That's probably true. Just to expand on this idea: Notch's priorities when he wrote Minecraft were quite different from most of our priorities as an employee, I would wager.
I dunno about you, but writing truly readable, intuitive, easy to maintain code is quite difficult. And you'll likely never get it right the first time. Refactoring for readability takes consultation from other human beings, and lots of time.
And when you're writing software for a business, it's really important to put in that time. You know what you're writing is going to last five or ten or more years and will be seen by dozens of people. It _needs_ to be good.
But for a guy working independently on a novel project? Fuck all that, I say. Just iterate as fast as you can towards the vision that you have while keeping some minimum standard of readability/maintainability. It doesn't need to be very good code, it just needs to be good enough that you can go back to it later without being completely confused.
I dunno about you, but writing truly readable, intuitive, easy to maintain code is quite difficult. And you'll likely never get it right the first time. Refactoring for readability takes consultation from other human beings, and lots of time.
And when you're writing software for a business, it's really important to put in that time. You know what you're writing is going to last five or ten or more years and will be seen by dozens of people. It _needs_ to be good.
But for a guy working independently on a novel project? Fuck all that, I say. Just iterate as fast as you can towards the vision that you have while keeping some minimum standard of readability/maintainability. It doesn't need to be very good code, it just needs to be good enough that you can go back to it later without being completely confused.