> Notch took a level editor and made it into the game itself. That isn't an easy thing to figure out and takes time.

He built an infiniminer clone for himself when it was discontinued. It certainly grew into more than that, but that's where it started.

>> People have recreated that core game many times with fairly trivial code

> Yes, because they have something to reference.

But you couldn't reimplement podman in a few hundred lines of code.

> Ideas are easy

Not all ideas have the same quality. Should be self evident. Nevertheless you should be able to see that I understand ideas are cheap in some sense - that's what the comment about decoupling "this was an iterative process" from "I could never do this." You can transfer an idea effortlessly - it's more about implementing it. But if its it trival to implement clearly more of the brilliance was on the idea side of things.

> But you couldn't reimplement podman in a few hundred lines of code.

You don't even need a few hundred: https://github.com/p8952/bocker

And then there's 'dokku' which IIRC, started as a bash version of Heroku.

> Not all ideas have the same quality.

They really do. I've heard all kinds of things in my career, but almost none I would want to dedicate a portion of my life building. Not because they are bad ideas or won't work, but because of the person with the idea or it just didn't interest me. Those people went on to be moderately successful (like hundreds of millions worth) but I'm glad I wasn't on that ride.

That would prove my point though. If it actually is that easy to implement then podman is more in the “good idea” than complicated implementation category as well.

It is an idea, and podman wasn't the first (by far) to come up with something. They just had good timing and marketing. That is what is truly important: execution of the idea.