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 considerable amount of my life [1][2][3] figuring out this terrible crap and working around it. Notch is a very bad programmer, and people only revere him because he made Minecraft.
To reply to you all at once: regardless of his ability to create or ship a game, which is not in question, his ability to write good code should not be idolized. His failures have tangible reprecussions that have long plagued the Minecraft hacking community and Mojang itself.
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 considerable amount of my life [1][2][3] figuring out this terrible crap and working around it. Notch is a very bad programmer, and people only revere him because he made Minecraft.
To reply to you all at once: regardless of his ability to create or ship a game, which is not in question, his ability to write good code should not be idolized. His failures have tangible reprecussions that have long plagued the Minecraft hacking community and Mojang itself.
[1] https://github.com/SirCmpwn/Craft.Net
[2] https://github.com/SirCmpwn/Tomato
[3] https://github.com/SirCmpwn/organic