Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> He is a terrible, terrible coder. I've had an idea brewing in my head for quite some time, and while I still don't quite have the words to express it completely, it more or less boils down to this: There isn't necessarily a correlation between being a good programmer and shipping a successful product. Now of course we can argue over the definition of "good programmer" and "successful product". I started as a hobby…
Does it work and will you maintain it?
In my experience I often had to often fix dozens of critical bugs of "getting things done" programmers.
I often hear "I will fix this later", "I will refactor it later", "but it works", "we can write tests later", "I will comment/document later", "I will clean up later" from these people giving it to maintenance programmers who rewrite the stuff, cause it is too ugly to deal with.
That's a big problem. People write code and other people have to fix this "but it works" code. Great, when you have a node.js application only running cause there is try catches around things hiding all the errors, killing the logging back end.
If you are the only one to read the code than it's fine to do whatever you want with it, as long as it works. But usually code that really works is well-written, well-commented, tested, etc.