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Comment by TillE | Hacker News Reader

Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft are both incredible, complex games made by one mediocre programmer (not commenting on the Mojang team, just Notch himself). It's frustrating, but it should also serve as an inspiration to any small, talented team that wants to go even further.

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You should be commenting on "the Mojang team", not Notch. Minecraft was way more performant when Notch was working on it. There were a number of blogposts in the recent past about how Minecraft maintainers rewriting Minecraft to be more object-oriented and idiomatic have trashed what little performance there was.

It was only more performant because it did less back then. And Notch had to incorporate fan mods to the lighting and chunk rendering code to even achieve that.

There have been recent issues but lets not pretend they aren't the sort of mistakes Notch liked to make.

Go look it up - recent patches have had massive increases in CPU and RAM usage not because of new features, but because of making the code prettier. Notch may not be an expert on lighting or chunk rendering, but he's pretty good at writing efficient game code.

Just goes to show that shipping matters more than perfect code...

Ever wonder how many projects fail to ship because the developers are concerned their code isn't good enough?

I imagine the shipping developers don't!

I'd like to be a mediocre programmer as Notch...

Mediocre may be the wrong word, but perhaps "unmeticulous".

Ships things that work.

Adequate practice beats out sublime theory every time.

It's another example of Worse is Better

Under the assumption that Minecraft could not have been delivered as quickly or seen a similar level of success if properly engineered. For Notch, this may be true. But that doesn't mean it is a golden rule for all developers. In fact, I don't think it is very closely related at all. More of a coincidence.

I think that's a rather severe misinterpretation of Worse is Better. Worse is Better doesn't mean ship with silly bugs and never fix them; it means ship simple, understandable systems. The canonical example is that unix system calls sometimes need to be restarted instead of always succeeding. But that doesn't mean unix succeeded because its system calls would randomly return incorrect data.

I always thought it was a better example of deciding if you should optimize code or just throw faster hardware at a system.

Mediocre or not, I'd sure love to have a look at Dwarf Fortress' code.

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