<story><title>Notch live coding for Ludum dare 22</title><url>http://sv.twitch.tv/notch</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hucker</author><text>It&apos;s interesting to see such a prominent and talented coder do his work on (what looks like) a totally stock Eclipse install. Not that there is anything wrong with it at all, but it puts into perspective all the time &quot;wasted&quot; by thousands of programmers (myself included) around the world tweaking their vimrc to perfection, obsessing over tiling vs traditional window managers, and in general worrying a great deal about the &quot;optimal&quot; workspace.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s rather refreshing to see someone that just does his work with tools that are sufficient to do the job.&lt;p&gt;Come to think of it, I see this phenomena quite often at the university I attend. The &quot;average&quot; guys have regular flamewars on what language is best or whether vim or emacs or some IDE is the ultimate tool, MacBook Pro versus Thinkpad and so on, while the actual top guys keep churning out quality code in whatever language fits the task on whatever machine available at the time with whatever OS is on that machine.&lt;p&gt;This is obviously a great simplification and a single anecdote, but I think there is some truth to it. Masters of art obsess over the artwork itself, not the tools used to create it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>akkartik</author><text>I see the same data and come to the opposite conclusion. People with 10x my brain power can deal with dumb tools, verbose languages, a malicious codebase, architecture astronauts. I&apos;m too stupid to do what they do, so I try to pick my battles and live where it&apos;s simple.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;m not arguing for obsessing over tools, or for flamewars. But perhaps the dumber you are the more you should pay attention to foundations.</text></comment>
<story><title>Notch live coding for Ludum dare 22</title><url>http://sv.twitch.tv/notch</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hucker</author><text>It&apos;s interesting to see such a prominent and talented coder do his work on (what looks like) a totally stock Eclipse install. Not that there is anything wrong with it at all, but it puts into perspective all the time &quot;wasted&quot; by thousands of programmers (myself included) around the world tweaking their vimrc to perfection, obsessing over tiling vs traditional window managers, and in general worrying a great deal about the &quot;optimal&quot; workspace.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s rather refreshing to see someone that just does his work with tools that are sufficient to do the job.&lt;p&gt;Come to think of it, I see this phenomena quite often at the university I attend. The &quot;average&quot; guys have regular flamewars on what language is best or whether vim or emacs or some IDE is the ultimate tool, MacBook Pro versus Thinkpad and so on, while the actual top guys keep churning out quality code in whatever language fits the task on whatever machine available at the time with whatever OS is on that machine.&lt;p&gt;This is obviously a great simplification and a single anecdote, but I think there is some truth to it. Masters of art obsess over the artwork itself, not the tools used to create it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nate</author><text>There&apos;s also maybe a similar point to be made about him using Java to code his games.&lt;p&gt;Java gets a lot of bashing these days, and there&apos;s so many &quot;hot&quot; languages to mention during those bashing sessions. But in the end, the guy creates games people have a strong desire to play. And then he uses the technologies he&apos;s comfortable with to get whatever job done.</text></comment>