> “I have the ability to get code done, but I’m impatient and it’s scrappy as a result. Maybe that helped me with Minecraft, as it came quickly. But, well, at some point, I’d like to actually become a good programmer.”
It's amazing that he doesn't consider himself to be a good programmer. In what other profession would someone as accomplished as Persson say that?
There aren't that many professions were a decent piece of work that makes one person happy can scale up to make a million people happy with minimal marginal effort.
Excellent example. Most famous rock musicians aren't extraordinarily talented at playing their instruments - Richard Wright of Pink Floyd couldn't even read sheet music. Jimmy Page is quite a sloppy guitarist.
Pure technical ability is a dime a dozen. Check YouTube for a zillion teenagers who can play shred guitar as well as anyone. But inspired creativity is rare and valuable, and execution requires only a certain level of technical ability, not mastery.
Have you actually seen him coding? From what I have heard/seen on video, he is very fast, his code is readable and relatively concise (for Java). And efficiently displaying this giant fully-modifiable voxel world on all types of hardware is no small feat. Also the procedural landscape generation is fairly brilliant. And the whole crafting system that allowed for world modification. I think you should give him credit for doing a great execution of some really cutting edge ideas.
Not wanting to take anything from notch, but I do concur with the parent. I've seen his live casts, and sure they are great, but let's not kid ourselves, his code is not that great. He is fast cause he knows the libraries he uses very well (which is admirable) but at the time, put me in front of DX9 and my speed was the same. Now put me in front of iOS code and I can probably match it. I think he just got to that status where people idolise him (heck, I remember when his first livecast was out, 100s of blogs doing their own 'what I learn from watching notch code' like he was some super coder, which weren't much more than typical stuff you learn in the first 2-3 years working at a company(at least in games).
And from other sources (can't verify) minecraft code is reported to be quite bad, which is the main reason many of the bugs weren't fixed very fast.
Having said that, he had a vision, executed it well and made a lot of money. My hat is off to him for that.
Watched him live coding August 2011 -- it was incredible. I know there are better programmers, especially on a systems level, but it's still just... wow.
That's probably true. Just to expand on this idea: Notch's priorities when he wrote Minecraft were quite different from most of our priorities as an employee, I would wager.
I dunno about you, but writing truly readable, intuitive, easy to maintain code is quite difficult. And you'll likely never get it right the first time. Refactoring for readability takes consultation from other human beings, and lots of time.
And when you're writing software for a business, it's really important to put in that time. You know what you're writing is going to last five or ten or more years and will be seen by dozens of people. It _needs_ to be good.
But for a guy working independently on a novel project? Fuck all that, I say. Just iterate as fast as you can towards the vision that you have while keeping some minimum standard of readability/maintainability. It doesn't need to be very good code, it just needs to be good enough that you can go back to it later without being completely confused.
It's amazing that he doesn't consider himself to be a good programmer. In what other profession would someone as accomplished as Persson say that?