Thank you Freshyill and JWN! I nearly ripped my hair out trying to keep the Minecraft, Forge, and the JVM in sync version-wise for the Pixelmon mod. I tried upgrading just one of them and the Pixelmon mod silently failed.
Of course the forums are a Wild Wild West of inconsistent solutions that make me feel like Druidic incantations would be just as effective.
Minecraft dev culture in 2014 in general feels exactly like microcomputer dev culture in 1985, speaking as a guy who was there. Version control, whats that? Why would I want to open my source code, free software whats that? We don't need standards or APIs we can just hack it into working, one piece at a time. What do you mean a development methodology or strategy, we just start coding? If you find a bug, its your fault, if you don't like seeing bugs then stop finding them. What is all this scalability and O(n) talk I don't understand why that could matter. We don't do documentation (although in minecraft world in 2014 rather than make a one page doc in five minutes, we get unprofessionally produced 45 minute youtube videos as "docs".) What do you mean by a "silo", why would a silo be bad, I just wanna admin my own webforum and only use my forum.
Its a really retro game, and I'm not talking about block graphics. Culturally and technologically its like something out of shareware game programming on a C64 in the 80s.
The crazy thing, is in 2014 there's a lot of people making a lot of money telling us that doesn't work, but just like 80s software development, it really DOES work. Maybe not well, maybe lots of heads pounding on desks in frustration, but it works surprisingly well.
If you're in the modern dev community it does feel like visiting a museum or an Amish community, very deja vous.
Of course the forums are a Wild Wild West of inconsistent solutions that make me feel like Druidic incantations would be just as effective.