Have you actually seen him coding? From what I have heard/seen on video, he is very fast, his code is readable and relatively concise (for Java). And efficiently displaying this giant fully-modifiable voxel world on all types of hardware is no small feat. Also the procedural landscape generation is fairly brilliant. And the whole crafting system that allowed for world modification. I think you should give him credit for doing a great execution of some really cutting edge ideas.
Not wanting to take anything from notch, but I do concur with the parent. I've seen his live casts, and sure they are great, but let's not kid ourselves, his code is not that great. He is fast cause he knows the libraries he uses very well (which is admirable) but at the time, put me in front of DX9 and my speed was the same. Now put me in front of iOS code and I can probably match it. I think he just got to that status where people idolise him (heck, I remember when his first livecast was out, 100s of blogs doing their own 'what I learn from watching notch code' like he was some super coder, which weren't much more than typical stuff you learn in the first 2-3 years working at a company(at least in games).
And from other sources (can't verify) minecraft code is reported to be quite bad, which is the main reason many of the bugs weren't fixed very fast.
Having said that, he had a vision, executed it well and made a lot of money. My hat is off to him for that.
Watched him live coding August 2011 -- it was incredible. I know there are better programmers, especially on a systems level, but it's still just... wow.
