>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.
Notch is inspiring to me the way people like Carmack are not, because I know I'll never be a Carmack -- he's operating on an entirely different level than me. But Notch was able to change the world as a regular programmer plugging away. What he does not seem hopelessly out of reach of my capabilities. You can have a huge impact just being 'good enough'!
(and 'terrible' is hyperbole -- certainly most of the programmers around me at work could not get a 3D engine with Dart up and running in a week, or design a cpu and assembler -- even bad ones.)
>(and 'terrible' is hyperbole -- certainly most of the programmers around me at work could not get a 3D engine with Dart up and running in a week, or design a cpu and assembler -- even bad ones.)
Fuck, most of those I know couldn't get a basic CRUD app up and running in a week...
Speaking as a harmonica player, this is a bit like the difference between listening to Toots Thielemans and Stevie Wonder.
When I listen to Toots, I'm thinking, "This is amazing, and wonderful! Aw man, I could never do anything like that."
When I listen to Stevie, I'm thinking, "This is amazing, and wonderful! Wait a minute... It's not that complicated. Maybe I'll never have the soul Stevie does, but if I can't do exactly that, maybe I could do something like that!"
Notch is inspiring to me the way people like Carmack are not, because I know I'll never be a Carmack -- he's operating on an entirely different level than me. But Notch was able to change the world as a regular programmer plugging away. What he does not seem hopelessly out of reach of my capabilities. You can have a huge impact just being 'good enough'!
(and 'terrible' is hyperbole -- certainly most of the programmers around me at work could not get a 3D engine with Dart up and running in a week, or design a cpu and assembler -- even bad ones.)