It's not a joke. Notch is good at thinking of fun game ideas and implementing them, but he's not a very skilled software developer. I'd never hire him.
He belongs right where he is, as an indie game developer - kickstarting a fun game, alone, from scratch, proving that it is popular and that people love it, and then letting more skillful programmers take over developing it and fixing all the bugs that he created.
I'd have to guess that he is in fact a very skilled software developer. Minecraft is a fairly complex project, as is emulating a 16-bit CPU within the constraints of a game environment.
I created mineflayer[0] - software which implements the minecraft client/server protocol and provides an API so that you can create minecraft bots in javascript. So I followed minecraft development for a while, decompiled and analyzed the code, had to deal with the shitty protocol, and observed the way bugs are introduced and solved.
I've seen his posts about how git is too hard to learn[1] so he's going to stick with svn. I've seen him post that "we've started to bring in bug fixing into the development method"[2], and then the very next release is a "bug fix" release which causes more new bugs than it solves.[3]
I wouldn't hire him for a software development job that required any level of maintenance. He's good at creating original fun concepts but not at making it nice for people to read, modify, or maintain his code.
Also, I would argue that emulating a 16-bit CPU within the constraints of a game environment is easy and straightforward. For one, it's ridiculously simple to do test driven development without any overhead. And second, have you seen all the emulators that have cropped up after the specs were posted? There is already an emulator for almost every popular programming language.
>Although I don't agree with his opinion, he's surely entitled to one.
Everybody's entitled to have one. Did I try to suppress him expressing his opinion? No, I just piled mine on top.
> It doesn't take a chicken to judge an egg.
"Goes to credibility, your honor", as they say in legal tv series.
I don't know about chickens and eggs, but I believe that it sure takes a good programmer to be able to judge another. It's a technical field, it's not something really subjective. So you have to know your stuff in order to judge what someone else does --if anything, we have too many misinformed opinions.
He belongs right where he is, as an indie game developer - kickstarting a fun game, alone, from scratch, proving that it is popular and that people love it, and then letting more skillful programmers take over developing it and fixing all the bugs that he created.