User blog comment:BronzeHammer/Mevans V Notch!/@comment-27723099-20150622110359

You can't compare it. Programming skill is not a 1 dimensional value. There are many fields of programming.

All in all, I think it's a tie. Both started it as a hobby project.

Notch was a professional programmer when he started it and you have to be experienced to make millions of blocks tick and render on a screen without lag (One chunk consists of 65,536 blocks. With a render distance of 10 chunks, you will have around 1250 chunks loaded. I saw amateurs trying to recreate Minecraft and it lagged extremely with just 25,000 blocks). When Minecraft became successful, Notch had to deal with marketing and business stuff and couldn't code much anymore. I think that's why he finally selled Mojang.

Since the first release of Minecraft, many parts of the code was changed and even completely rewritten very often to improve the performance or to allow new features. I think even the computer technology was much different during the beginning of Minecraft and modern technology (and programming techniques) can do many things much more efficiently.

Mevans started with MC modding when he was nearly conmpletely new to programming. The LOTR mod was his second project, after the Lion King mod. At the beginning he copied a lot of vanilla code and modified it where necessary. Doing that, he could find problems in the vanilla code and improve them. Later he created advanced features completely from the scratch. The map based world generation, although in the code much easier than the vanilla world generation, was a huge invention. All in all, Mevans used the gameplay and graphics style of vanilla. Mevans does make a lot of programming mistakes (example) but his close contact to the community helps to fix them quickly.

All in all, considering Mevans' lack of professional experience, both are around equal. But keep in mind that creating something completely new is harder than adding to it.