Maybe he just said he wasn't the greatest developer and that the code wasn't well organized. That's called modesty and honesty.

In this era of self-promotion some people actually can't recognize those things.

But I think its very obvious that he is a good programmer. His work is literally legendary.

I feel the same way about Notch. He was being modest when being critical of his own code. Besides, Minecraft was little more than a weekend project when he started. The whole idea is to move fast when prototyping game ideas.

It's unfortunate that people latched on and the "Notch is a bad coder" meme took off. I imagine the same is true with Tarn.

>But I think its very obvious that he is a good programmer. His work is literally legendary.

"His work", as in, the game he made. Game development is a multi-faceted beast. It is quite possible that while game design is awesome, technical implementation is a mess even if it reaches the goals.

I have heard DF being praised for having so many things to do, for being able to create wild stories, etc, but never for technical excellence.

Good devs get shit done. Feel however you want about the cleanliness of your code vs that of others, but Tarn created something that will be recognized for its significance to gaming culture for the foreseeable future.

Well they say hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard...

DF is definitely an admirable and awe-inspiring project, regardless of the beauty of its innards

> Tarn isn't known for being a good developer. He's just very dedicated :)

Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration - Thomas Edison.

I feel like I see this quite often with large, single man projects, both inside and outside of IT (Henry Darger comes to mind). I feel like there might be some kind of bias at work here, but I do think it's interesting to see that traits like "being a good developer" don't seem to correlate very strongly with making large, successful personal projects.