Re:Programming is terrible – Lessons learned from a life was...
by nemothekid on Monday March 16, 2015 @05:04AM
(#9210473)
uhh...when you mention NASA engineers and Google "actually making something" while adhering to strict code quality you seem to overlook the fact that NASA and Google are organizations with thousands of developers and notch is ONE GUY.
And Tim Sweeney did a lot of development on Unreal 4 on his own[1]. The trade offs of structure & abandon can work at many scales, you don't have to be Google to do it. Likewise Redis[2] has largely been the work of a single developer, and isn't reckless.
Now while Minecraft is a toy and Notch likely didn't start out with the thought to develop it into a business, that doesn't mean the value of its code is worthless. Yes the tradeoffs are there, but we shouldn't get carried away and start to believe you can only write "good" code if you have a thousand engineers.
And Tim Sweeney did a lot of development on Unreal 4 on his own[1]. The trade offs of structure & abandon can work at many scales, you don't have to be Google to do it. Likewise Redis[2] has largely been the work of a single developer, and isn't reckless.
Now while Minecraft is a toy and Notch likely didn't start out with the thought to develop it into a business, that doesn't mean the value of its code is worthless. Yes the tradeoffs are there, but we shouldn't get carried away and start to believe you can only write "good" code if you have a thousand engineers.
[1]http://www.tgdaily.com/business-and-law-features/36436-tim-s... [2]https://github.com/antirez/redis/graphs/contributors