Notch, WebGL, Dart, and ramping up quickly

Post by F_Catalan » Wed, Dec 04, 2013, 12:16 AM UTC

ddevault wrote: post #29

kleiba wrote: post #19

Now, I haven't seen one line of Notch's code. I have no idea if it's well structured or spaghetti. I would make an educated guess and say that there's a lot of the basics in this project that have been ported over from the Minecraft or 0x10c code. This last point is rather unlikely I think. I spent more than one or two weeks worth of time watching the various screencasts you can find on twitch.tv of Notch coding (I f…

I've also spent time examining Notch's coding habits. He is a terrible, terrible coder. Minecraft was (and still is) an unoptimized, poorly designed piece of crap when he handed it off to the rest of Mojang. The DCPU-16 he designed had many flaws and his assembler for it threw out assembly convention. He makes very basic mistakes very frequently and his core designs are flawed. I say this as someone who has spent a c…

Post by peterashford » Wed, Dec 04, 2013, 12:20 AM UTC

ddevault wrote: post #29

kleiba wrote: post #19

Now, I haven't seen one line of Notch's code. I have no idea if it's well structured or spaghetti. I would make an educated guess and say that there's a lot of the basics in this project that have been ported over from the Minecraft or 0x10c code. This last point is rather unlikely I think. I spent more than one or two weeks worth of time watching the various screencasts you can find on twitch.tv of Notch coding (I f…

I've also spent time examining Notch's coding habits. He is a terrible, terrible coder. Minecraft was (and still is) an unoptimized, poorly designed piece of crap when he handed it off to the rest of Mojang. The DCPU-16 he designed had many flaws and his assembler for it threw out assembly convention. He makes very basic mistakes very frequently and his core designs are flawed. I say this as someone who has spent a c…

Post by throwaway2048 » Wed, Dec 04, 2013, 12:28 AM UTC

voltagex_ wrote: post #94

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As amusing as your wordplay might be, the point being made is that Notch's coding skill should not be idolized or used as a reference for writing good code . A tangible consequence of his inability is that Minecraft takes up far more resources than it reasonably should and is very difficult to maintain, which has been echoed by several Mojang devs who have since picked it up.

Do you think they'll ever move away from Java? Do you think Minecraft requires a complete rewrite to be maintainable?

Post by peterashford » Wed, Dec 04, 2013, 12:33 AM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #72

bcjordan wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the confused, blub is the hypothetical language from pg's essay Beating the Averages: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

Well, it's just an essay. Not something even remotely proven. A computer SCIENTIST should scorn the use of the "blub" notion as something that holds a priori.

Post by corresation » Wed, Dec 04, 2013, 12:42 AM UTC

crazy1van wrote: post #129

corresation wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Notch is a very bad programmer I despise this sort of single-dimension haughty evaluation of programming "goodness": It is garbage, and is the dismissive grenades that a particular type of maintenance programmer tosses to feel better about themselves as they try to feed the family with sloppy seconds. I single out maintenance programmers because there is a stark difference between creating something out of nothing, a…

>Notch is a very bad programmer If his goal is to create code that other programs will love to read, then maybe he is terrible. If his goal is to create software that millions of people will enjoy, then he is amazing. My guess is that he would describe his goal as the latter. Maybe his goal is different from yours.