Only those who claim to have that exprience or authority, should really be the ones being targetted with "you do it better, then" comments. Which is really just a matter of telling them "put your money where your mouth is".
Me? I won't ever claim that coding MineCraft couldhave been done better, nor worse. I know I don't have a fecking clue - I'm not a coder. But I still bristle at people throwing out claims that "I'm a coder, so I know it could have been done better", leaving no room for uncertainty, admitting no margin of error. Well, if the person making that claim is so absolutely certain of their claim ... let's see them prove it, is how I feel.
I think you misunderstand my argument, then. My argument isn't "I'm a coder, I therefore know that it could've been done better." It's something more akin to "compared to industry norms, this development process leaves much to be desired."
I can only judge on the bits and pieces that show through, but quite a lot makes itself evident with each large update. With this update:
1. We saw almost complete ignorance about the bugs contained within the program, even those that were show-stopping. He didn't know about the furnace bug until the day before. Did nobody in Mojang try putting things in a furnace?
This points to a severe lack of internal testing. It's obvious that no unit testing was done or else he would've known about quite a lot of these bugs beforehand. We beta testers are here to catch things that such testing misses, specifically bugs based upon different hardware/software setups or very specific in-game situations. Such obvious bugs should be caught long before they reach us, yet they weren't. The dev team was absolutely clueless about them.
2. We saw the willingness to push patches to live despite knowing that they include show-stopping bugs. Notch found out about the furnace bug the day before releasing the patch but went on with releasing it anyways. It should never have gone live. He should have went back into the code, fixed it, and then resubmitted it to the internal testing process (that one that likely doesn't exist).
3. The combination of the prior two lead to what we saw last week: A rapid-fire parade of untested patches that fixed (or, in the case of the CPU-usage bug, didn't fix) some issues while introducing numerous more, and the community is sent through a roller coaster ride of stable/unstable builds. This is what a train-wreck looks like. It should never happen, yet it happens every update. This is why threads like this exist. This is why there's so much complaining on the forums.
4. Now, with multiple issues left unresolved and the "bug fix" update creating about as many bugs as it fixed, Notch is already thinking about 1.7 and adding more stuff to the game. He doesn't ever finish what he started with each patch. That's why this "bug fix" update was even necessary, because he let loads and loads of bugs sit around after each update, not bothering to fix them before going to work on something else. It's just really bad practice.
The thing that I think is most important: Is this indicative of what we can expect from Mojang in the future? Is this indicative of the amount of care and effort they're going to put into their other projects as well?
We've gone on like this for well over a year now, so signs are pointing to yes. It just reflects really badly on the company as a whole. It makes them look unfocused, unprofessional and incompetent. Surely they can do better. They just need to inject some structure and rigor into their process.
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Retired StaffI think you misunderstand my argument, then. My argument isn't "I'm a coder, I therefore know that it could've been done better." It's something more akin to "compared to industry norms, this development process leaves much to be desired."
I can only judge on the bits and pieces that show through, but quite a lot makes itself evident with each large update. With this update:
1. We saw almost complete ignorance about the bugs contained within the program, even those that were show-stopping. He didn't know about the furnace bug until the day before. Did nobody in Mojang try putting things in a furnace?
This points to a severe lack of internal testing. It's obvious that no unit testing was done or else he would've known about quite a lot of these bugs beforehand. We beta testers are here to catch things that such testing misses, specifically bugs based upon different hardware/software setups or very specific in-game situations. Such obvious bugs should be caught long before they reach us, yet they weren't. The dev team was absolutely clueless about them.
2. We saw the willingness to push patches to live despite knowing that they include show-stopping bugs. Notch found out about the furnace bug the day before releasing the patch but went on with releasing it anyways. It should never have gone live. He should have went back into the code, fixed it, and then resubmitted it to the internal testing process (that one that likely doesn't exist).
3. The combination of the prior two lead to what we saw last week: A rapid-fire parade of untested patches that fixed (or, in the case of the CPU-usage bug, didn't fix) some issues while introducing numerous more, and the community is sent through a roller coaster ride of stable/unstable builds. This is what a train-wreck looks like. It should never happen, yet it happens every update. This is why threads like this exist. This is why there's so much complaining on the forums.
4. Now, with multiple issues left unresolved and the "bug fix" update creating about as many bugs as it fixed, Notch is already thinking about 1.7 and adding more stuff to the game. He doesn't ever finish what he started with each patch. That's why this "bug fix" update was even necessary, because he let loads and loads of bugs sit around after each update, not bothering to fix them before going to work on something else. It's just really bad practice.
The thing that I think is most important: Is this indicative of what we can expect from Mojang in the future? Is this indicative of the amount of care and effort they're going to put into their other projects as well?
We've gone on like this for well over a year now, so signs are pointing to yes. It just reflects really badly on the company as a whole. It makes them look unfocused, unprofessional and incompetent. Surely they can do better. They just need to inject some structure and rigor into their process.