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.