Has there ever been anything on the level of Myst/Riven published in the last 20 years?

This headline is like writing "Walt Disney hand drew 60,000 frames of Snow White".

(correct me if I'm wrong)

What’s cool has been to watch him grow from this young adult who made a game about time to this beast he is today. Hats off my guy. Now finish your programming language!

I think he must have spent 9 years working on his new programming language and one year working on the game.

This is so fascinating to me, because when I really get a piece of creative art, like I thought I did with both Braid and The Witness, I usually feel like I get some insight and empathy with the person who created it. Yet every time I read or hear from Jonathan Blow ... I do not feel that. So, I guess I've been challenged by art again, hooray!

http://number-none.com/blow/prototypes/index.html

It's very different from his more recent stuff, but charming.

It's a pretty short game - a couple of hours, if you don't spend hours and hours stuck on one of the puzzles. (just look up a walkthrough at that point - the game's not so awesome to be worth spending hours stuck)

Like a fascist would! /s

That is, his “pure engineers” are not really doing engineering, at least under my understanding of the term, whereas (some of) the impure engineers actually are! :)

Interesting, and thanks for the sources. I was under the impression that it was the same fund as that announced in 2010 [1] but the date in [2] plus the apparent timeline does align.

"I'm not sure he would be today" is a strawman and just Hazelden's own current views of Blow, but I doubt there's going to be a direct quote (or even better, a new grant from Thekla) to back it up. But yes, 7 years is a long time and the political landscape has changed "somewhat".

[1] http://the-witness.net/news/2010/03/announcing-indie-fund/

[2] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/the-witness-studio-offering-us...

It doesn’t seem untrue, though given the environment at the time justified, but that comment was extrapolated to “He’s a hard-right anti vaxxer”. No citations of my own though, so this is just memory.

Either way, this is why I try to stay off Twitter.

Supposedly the dev budget for the last pokémon game Z-A was only $13 million.

There's a lot of people for whom what you're talking about is in fact a huge draw. Everyone likes different types of games, and that's fine; I don't really think we're at risk of losing one to the other :)

I'd also put forward that you can still make open-world games with 100s of hours of content that are still truly exceptional - look at Red Dead Redemption 2, for example.

https://qntm.org/clean

There is a massive gap between Handmade Hero and a bloated, unoptimized game. It's one thing to be a purist that wants to do everything Handmade Hero style. It's another thing entirely to claim people who don't do that are hacks who don't care about their craft. There is A LOT to game development other than writing things from scratch.

Casey has made great resources, but I understand OPs frustration. He's created a culture of devs that think people shipping games over 100mb are soulless profit chasers. Animal Well is awesome, but not everyone wants to spend 7 years making a platformer.

In particular I believe the SOA stuff is gone, my impression (I don't have privileged access) is that SOA is one of those ideas where you think "Oh! This changes everything" and for the next week or two every time you do something you realise SOA would make it better. But a year later you find yourself unwinding some of that SOA mania and you realise eh... this isn't such a great idea that it deserves to be a key language differentiator. It's not useless but it's also not fundamental so maybe write a library or something.

There are a few other data structure tricks which can hit people this way, I remember I had a brief period where I wanted to solve everything with Bloom Filters and then I got better.

In terms of languages you can go try yourself today, the closest might be Ginger Bill's Odin. Shared scepticism for both C++ and modern language trends, syntax is reminiscent though far from identical. I'd be surprised if you hate one but love the other.

Edited: Somehow I removed "no longer" from my initial sentence during editing, which inverted the sense, now fixed.

1: https://www.resetera.com/threads/jonathan-blow-the-witness-b...

I'm impressed with how well you summarized my thoughts about him. I vaguely recall having this impression about him after I read his technical article (can't remember the topic) and decided that I don't think I need to read more from someone that comes through as an asshole. This was around the time The Witness came out, I'm quite happy that I didn't have to witness (hah!) what sounds like his further slide into the madness.

I assumed they were friends as there are several videos of them conversing. The parent comment pointed out that Sean agree's with the negatives about Jon, which could not mean much, but the fact that Jon's negative as described in the Dreknek are really bad indicates to me that Sean likely doesn't view Jon as a good friend anymore. This is surprising to me because I really did enjoy one of their videos where they try and solve a problem together.

The fact that Sean agrees with this critical take of Jon is further evidence of how much Jon has changed since the pandemic.

STB Is the intial's for Sean T Barrett, who also created a software library with the same name.

Well, that was pretentious.

I don't think I'm the smartest guy in the room, and that's OK. I realised a long time ago that ego/arrogance isn't a great quality and it's far better to have a strong network of friends and supporters, and that doesn't happen if you're an arrogant prick.

And yes, he built the language (which is totally un-needed) because the "idiots" who made all the existing languages, didn't make one as good as in JBlows brain. Despite the fact that there are 1000s of games which are far better than anything JB has made written in C#, C++, Java, Rust, etc. Did Larian need to write a new programming language to make Baldurs Gate 3?

Only JB is arrogant to think that only a new language is good enough for him to make a game with. A game that is just a modern spin on Sokoban and where he paid a bunch of other game devs to use their puzzles! You could write this shit in three.js and it wouldnt look or feel any differently.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZokQov_aH0

I think Blow achieved what he wanted, which I guess makes it a good game in a sense but also it wasn't an experience I enjoyed or can easily recommend to others.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko

Where are you getting a decade from? Consoles ship more often then that.

He's somewhat Musk adjacent in his need to be viewed as smart (but I guess he does so least have way more programming chops than Musk, so I'll give him that).

The excellent thing about Blue Prince is that it isn't afraid to keep giving you more clues. I've seen people go "Bridge. Bride. I see what's happening - I will write these down" on day one. But I've also seen people walk into Study, look at the chart and go "Huh. I wonder what that's about" and walk out without any flicker of understanding. Those latter people will, hopefully, one day read the Letter in Herbert's private chest freezer, and maybe that's enough.

The Gallery puzzle isn't actually an exception to that, but it's very close. There is one small clue, and two bigger one, and then it's you versus the artist. The small clue is in a document you've never read because you need all those keys†. That document is just another set of clues, sorry, you don't even get another credits rolls. There is only one Credits Roll in the whole game and it's for reaching 46 the first time on a save, even though that's nowhere near all of the game. There's a deliberate fake out, later, but no other actual credit rolls and no explicit end, just the game starts to point out that you can just stop playing at first in subtle ways but gradually quite blatantly. It is just a game, go do something else.

† Technically you could just guess an answer, but this is after all a puzzle game so where's the fun in that?

I didn't say anything about hating working on the code, but every example of game code I've seen has been a mess, even in games that are considered well designed. So I have to disagree - the process and finished work often are separable. What are ports if not an example of that?

Maybe for you. For people like me, voting for Trump is completely unacceptable, in particular after the experiences with the first Trump administration.

> Are you kidding? He is the best President we have had in my entire life, by far. It's a miracle. I just hope it doesn't abruptly go bad.

(In reply to a post ruing Trump’s “showmanship” and wishing that the Republican Party had produced a “legit” candidate.)

Heckling is a lot easier than creating. Personally, I think we have an over supply of “ideas guys“

I've gotta disagree. By "political correctness" people generally mean to not saying or doing anything that could be perceived as offensive. Especially against collectives perceived to be vulnerable.

For example, in the tiny paragraph above I've absolutely respected my fellow humans, but it can be considered offensive because you can suppose I might be looking to justify prejudiced attitudes.

For an even more evident example, political correctness has to do with the political climate and identity (as you mention: sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, or anything else, as well as referring to "those groups"). That is very much detached from treating fellow humans respectfully.

I think the lack of this distinction has led to much, and very painful and bitter online discussion, whereas people in a tribalist political mindset try to pigeonhole others based on a throwaway statement into either a friendly or enemy camp.

I broadly agree with the value that competence is more important in politeness or vibes, especially in people who build critical infrastructure - in fact it is a very very welcome property of these people that they care about things on a level that seems unreasonable to me.

This is true basically of everything critically important in life. One example is security. Everyone enjoys the privilege of using a web browser to visit any website and not have their PC compromised thanks to a variety of measures created by people who care intensely about these things.

If the crash testing on my car was done by people who sought out some amicable middle ground so as to not upset engineers who have to redo the frame of the car after a test gone horribly wrong, and accounting, who gets the bill for it, I would be sweating bullets every time I had to drive anywhere.

Politics imo is the worst sort of tribalism - the idea that people must be sorted into totally disjunct groups who are the bitter enemies of each other - thankfully doesn't translate into practice. Two people might root for sports teams that are eternal rivals, one person's favorite food might be hated by the other, they might disagree on what the important issues are, or what should be done about them, but thankfully that doesn't necessarily stop them from being the best of friends.

That's why there's a blanket ban on discussing politics in every place where people are expected to maintain amicable civility towards each other - family dinners, the workplace, gatherings with friends and acquaintances etc., with everyone usually getting antsy whenever 'politics' is brought up.

And programming is just pressing buttons on a keyboard.

I tried to play it on iOS and found the controls clunky. Interacting with some of the puzzles was difficult with my thumbs in the way.

As to why Rust, there's actual historical information about why Graydon wanted to make it and why Mozilla decided to fund that work after it was started.

Jon has said the intent was that Jai would allow him to make more games, because C++ held him back so much. So, yeah, it would need to be superior to C++ in at least this way, and by at least enough to justify the effort expended, writing C++, to develop Jai.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fABGyVzVwI

Your square list, for example, crosses 8 different studios.

My original question was poorly worded; I meant how many games -per studio- are being shipped by these big cos?

I don’t know which of the two happened here, maybe both, but if we’re mentioning one let’s also mention the other.

Edit: just read some tweets and I think I know which one it is XD you were underselling it.

That is 2021 mentality, and the world is over it.

Here's a good article that's basically a summary of events (as well as teaser for a book): https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/from-our-lab-to-theirs-...

If you want advice about making games would you rather learn from the person that routinely ships games or a person that shipped a game once 10 years ago?

Is that a trade off worth chasing? "Potential perfection" with nothing to show for it?

> Blow is a full-bore fascist sympathizer who also doesn't seem to think that women have any role to play in his profession.

The latter part being argued with a post where he merely opines that the sexes have different interests.

The implication was pretty clear to me, in that by reducing politics down to being things reasonable people can always disagree over, you're giving actual bad actors in the space too much credit.

> Ignoring how misinformed that opinion is

You are making up some random opinion (that I supposedly have, but that are nowhere to be found in what I wrote).

I say that as someone who once made him angry myself when I live-commented in one of his streams because I had a rare disagreement. I was maybe not in shock but at least startled by his reaction. I had presented my disagreement relatively casually.

Now, my impression is that he's tuned down his considerably and developed a more well meaning stance on things over the years. Recently I've found him more on the side of "here's how most people are doing this, I don't like this, maybe I don't think it's sustainable or how you get good results, but anyway here's what I like to do instead, make of it what you want".

Isn't he pretty far on the autistic spectrum? It can be very difficult for that kind of personality to re-evaluate something, once they think they have reached a "logical conclusion".

I'm not making excuses, just agreeing that the chances of him changing seem low.

Can it really be considered “relatively benign” when an extremely famous public figure is calling for people who disagree with them to be shot?

There are people in this thread comparing Trump to Hitler. I don't think Trump is the US finest president but those of my family who weren't slaves for the Germans were slaughtered.

The fact that people throw comparisons that are false on some massive scale around and it's completely normalized is an example why losing touch with reality is not only a problem of the right

The fact remains that Blue Prince would have been more enjoyable for those people who did see those bugs had some time been spent on better engineering.

I'm not endorsing slop, but rather advising against the equal but opposite.

I do agree that if you take from their "teachings" that every dev needs to optimize every thing, and never use any other language than system languages, that advice is myopic for most devs. However, I don't really see them arguing for that, at least not entirely.

From following their teaching for a while, they mostly preech about the following things which I agree with, even when talking about higher-level languages, technologies.

- Get the clowns out of the car: Don't make things needlessly expensive. Write simple procedural code that maps cleanly to what the hardware is doing. This is essentially stating OOP, large message passing, and other paradigms that abstract the problem away from the simple computations that are happening on your computer is actually adding complexity that isn't needed. This isn't about tuning your program to get the highest amount of performance, but rather, just write basic code, that is easy to follow and debug, that acts as a data-pipeline as much as possible. Using simple constructs to do the things you want, e.g. an if-statement versus inheritence for dynamic dispatch.

- Understand your problem domain, including the hardware, so you can reason about it. Don't abstract away the hardware your code is actually running on too much where you lose vital information on how to make it work well. I've seen this many times in my professional career, where devs don't know what hardware the code will be running on, and this inevitably makes their code slower, less responsive to the user and often drives up cost. There are many times in my early career (backend engineering), that just simplifying the code, designing the code so it works well for the hardware we expect, greatly lowered cost. The hardware is the platform and it shouldn't be ignored. Similarly, limitations that are imposed by your solution should be documented and understood. If you don't expect a TPS greater than some value, write that down, check for it, profile and make sure you know what your specturm of hardware can handle, and how much software utilization of that hardware you're getting.

- Focus on writing code, and don't get bogged down my fad methodologies (TDD, OPP, etc). Writing simple code, understanding the problem more deeply as you write, and not placing artifical constraints on yourself.

Now each of these points can be debated, but their harder to argue against IMO then the strawmany idea of them proposing that you must optimize as much as possible. And they argue that you will actually be more productive this way, and produce better software.

FWIW, you may have some datapoints showing that they do propose what I called a strawmany version of their ideas, but I have seen them advocating for the above points more so than anything else.

---

I do want to add, for Jon Blow, I don't think he has a problem with people using engines. From what I've seen he's played, and loved games that used engines in the past, and had no problem with their output in terms of gameplay or performance. From his talk about civilization ending relating to game dev, he's more concern that if no one tries to develop without an engine, we as a civilization will lose that ability.

We are on a discussion forum. One of the common use cases of a discussion forum is criticism and debate. Yes, we could all simply use the tools we want, and not use the tools we don't, and not waste time expressing an opinion either way, but again this is a discussion forum.

And it's not as if I posted "Jai delenda est" here, I think my opinions are mild compared to what people here have to say about javascript, or C++ or PHP or any other language. I just don't think that a gamedev specific language is a good idea, compared to implementing libraries and frameworks in an existing language. I don't like the bespoke languages used by frameworks like Godot or GameMaker either.

Braid came out the same time XBox Indie Games.

I will say, I do not find a lot of their rhetoric convincing. Especially for people who have never attempted to write the software they are criticizing.

Blow only writes single player games that do not persist significant data to the machine. Nothing bad happens if your save file is corrupted. Nothing of value is lost if scene transitions have a bug.

But they're going to tell me that hyper-scaled multi-user real-time software is written poorly?

Also, I've been watching Muratori's Handmade Hero series. The deeper it gets into the game, the worse it gets. At one point, he's like "Ah, I dunno, we'll implement bubble sort because we don't have time to do any other sort." Followed by a diatribe about why bubble sort is a bad name. It's a fine name. Things bubble up.

Second, merge sort is just as quick to write and faster.

But in general, they alternate between speaking in platitudes and disparaging other software.

> If a state entity does an oopsie in a lab, then forces its citizens to undergo an experimental treatment because of the oopsie, while suppressing news of side effects, and also denying that the oopsie is anyone's fault ... that's just abusive?

Unfortunately Blow was unwilling to come out and state his position here, relying instead on innuendo, so we have to kind of guess what he was trying to say. I interpret him as making four claims here:

1. The COVID-19 pandemic originated in a lab leak.

2. Some Chinese people were forced to accept experimental vaccinations.

3. The government of the PRC suppressed news of the side effects of the vaccines.

4. The government of the PRC worked to prevent investigations into the cause of the pandemic.

Claim #4 is plainly true; the WHO and several other countries have protested this at great length.

Claim #2 probably depends on your threshold for "experimental" and "forces". https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sinopharm_BIBP_CO... explains that emergency vaccination was available in China in July 02020, and there are plausible claims that Chinese state employees and students traveling abroad were required to take it. This was before results were in from clinical trials, which I think qualifies for most people's definition of "experimental"; the WHO wouldn't add it to its list of authorized emergency vaccines until May of the next year.

Claim #3 seems almost guaranteed to be true, but I don't have direct evidence. The government of the PRC routinely suppresses news, and there are numerous well-documented instances of this happening in connection with COVID, and there are always some subjects in clinical trials of vaccines who have major health problems such as death which may or may not be caused by the vaccine. BBIBP-CorV seems to have been, in the end, pretty safe, but it seems inconceivable that there weren't at least some news of people dying or having terrible health problems after receiving it which were deleted from Weibo or other media ("suppressed"), and that these deletions were carried out because of state policy of the PRC.

Claim #1 seems like the most debatable one, but even that isn't an open-and-shut case. At the time, the lab-leak case was fairly weak, and it certainly hasn't been proven, but it hasn't been disproven either; see https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-r... for an extensive summary of the debate. Because of the truth of Claim #4 it seems unlikely that it will ever be disproven.

More generally, I find deplorable the polarization on partisan political grounds of fields like puzzle games, genetics, and quantum physics. Artistic development, understanding the world, and extending technology are necessarily collaborative endeavors, and rejecting Blow's games because he criticizes the Chinese government seems akin to refusing to use the Schrödinger equation because Schrödinger sexually victimized teenage girls.

Am I supposed to take this seriously?

And how would he do that exactly to whatever ungodly standards you are setting for the man?

Many people have criticized C++ in past (which is very easy to do), yet he's practicing what he's preaching in the most direct way humanly possible, he's both (1) designed and implemented a new programming language (that has directly addressed most of the issues), whilst (2) also making a complete non-trivial game in the newly designed language at the same time.

His games have always taken long time to make, and now he's making game + engine + programming language. At the same frigging time!

The only "luxury" JBlow has is that he's an exceptional individual and you're not. He has rare combination of ability, perseverance and work ethic, and by all accounts most people are neither of those things at once.

Most criticisms 99% of time are either misrepresentitive, misinformed jealousy or something to do with politics.

I have no issue with personally acknowledging that some rare individuals are simply way better than me.

And to prevent sounding like a gushing-fanboy, I suspect that his newest game won't sell very well, because his first two games have atleast something to appeal to general public (either visuals of Witness or time travel mechanics (somewhat novel at the time) of Braid) while this game doesn't appear to have the same draw.

This game has too much of a generic-sokoban puzzler vibe to it to appeal to the general public who aren't already ardent puzzler fans (and are there enough of those and can he reach enough of them? etc). And the trailer doesn't help to change this perception.

Odin's creator has credited Jai as an influence. You can see him in the comments of old jai youtube videos (videos that go into a lot of depth about the language design). Odin's syntax and features are very similar to Jai, the influence is pretty clear. Odin has other influences of course but you could say it's "jai but open source".

Lastly, jai is not open source but it doesn't mean it's not available. You can message blow to get access to it. Many programmers have used it. There are third party jai libraries on github.

Lots of people have seen his talks about the language, so why do you think its impossible it influenced other languages?

I'm not saying these people were rays of sunshine before, I'm saying they could be talked to without them foaming at the mouth and you face palming at how unhinged they were. I was using the meaning of benign attached to tumors.

Simple example: They want ot fund the police

Their POV: make everyone safer

Another POV: fund bad people

Their POV isn't wrong, it's just different.

“It's amazing how much leftist discourse is just them pretending not to understand things, thus making discourse impossible.”

You even decry the lack of factual evidence in the critic’s case, but for some reason said nothing about Blow doing the same first.

That’s what looks silly to me. You’re not treating them the same.

Their covid vaccine program was voluntary up until they tried to establish a mandate in July of '22 (a lot of commentators seem to be confused on this point, as there are mandates for childhood vaccines in China - but these never extended to covid vaccines)

Beware anyone who claims to represent "all" of some large diverse group, such as "Women" or "Floridians".

"Women should have single sex spaces" turns out to be used to justify, "It's OK to be hateful and even violent against women in these spaces so long as your excuse is that you believe they're not actually women" which is bullshit.

Years ago, when I wasn't too tired to spend all day and half the night dancing, I went to Bang Face Weekender - basically imagine a huge multi-room club night except for days and days. I keep the socials for it available because hey, it's a nice memory. This sort of "Single sex spaces" bullshit caused a problem for the last-but-one Bang Face because a new-to-this Security outfit somehow decided it's their job to go remove people who in their view weren't women from a toilet for women. These women weren't causing any problems for anybody else, but because they presumably had the wrong genitals or for some other reason were "suspect" to that Security team, Security dragged them out of a toilet cubicle and threw them out of the site. Other clubbers were of course horrified, and the event runners had to apologise to everybody - because regardless of how many X chromosomes you have, or whether you do or don't have a womb, dragging people out of the toilets because you've got weird ideas about what is or isn't a woman is batshit.

I've shipped a few things over the years, but doubt I have strong takes in programming, besides 'the "properness" of a variables name is dependent on the amount of lines between it's definition and usage.' Doubt anyone will take my considerations seriously.

You have to twist logic pretty fucking hard to find a reason for him to put 88 in his username. He's a guy who thinks he's way more clever than he is and gets upset when it gets pointed out to him.

But we live in a world where the least charitable interpretation of anything comes first, so shrug

He says verbatim his goal is to be a stepping stone for serious engine programmers (not necessarily "general purpose", but definitely AAA-level), even though obviously we are not going to be making a AAA game for obvious reasons :)

So fair enough, but between that and his claim that he's showing people how to create a "professional quality" game I think the difference between a AAA game and a "AAA-level" game engine has no distinction, it's basically the same thing.

Is what he has done so far professional grade, capable of "AAA-level" games? I don't think so, but I concede that probably depends on what your parameters for "AAA" and "professional quality" are. It might be fine for indie games but it seems to me that Casey was selling an audience on revealing something deeper.

They have no standards, no oversight, no formal methodology, so naturally it attracts gossip-oriented people who want to stir up drama for fun.

He hasn't. He made a programming language that allows making a sokoban game in 10 years. That's probably not what people need. The industry can make similar games in a course of several months. It doesn't look like a groundbreaking achievement to me. A monumental amount of effort, sure, but the _result_ isn't there.

Plus, _in the past_, he made Braid, in C++, in a relatively practical way. He made money using the industry standards, now he loses money deviating from the industry standards. The question I'm interested in is: why would anyone listen to what the man _says_ if his own preaching makes him lose money?

But okay, you don't want to hear any of that. You keep fixating on the "luxury" part. The reason we talk about JBlow is because he made Braid back in 2008, and it was an awesome game, and it sold well. More importantly, the timing when it released - it was what kicked off the boom of the indie game development back then. He also made The Witness, and although it was also a good game, it was most likely not as groundbreaking as Braid, considering that he chose Braid instead of The Witness for a remaster. And then he complained that it, quote, "sold like dogs**", end of quote. Unfortunately, what was the jewel of the indie game development in 2008, doesn't really excite the audience that much in 2024. The world has moved on.

The music indsutry is well aware of a phenomenon of a "one-hit wonder". If the JBlow's qualities were the only reason he could make Braid and get rich enough to not release anything for a decade, then surely anybody with these qualities could make Braid 2 and do the same thing, correct? Well, nobody can do that. Not even JBlow himself. Not anymore. It's not 2008.

Therefore, yes, it is a luxury.

Are we seriously going to pretend that men and women—on average—do not differ in their general interests, and furthermore get mad at people for pointing that out?

And I'm not fond of the current administration, but it's a bit extreme to write someone off as a person for liking who is president. You would be writing off literally half of the entire country, and no, that's not something to feel virtuous about, that's just nonsense.

Frankly I think I would rather have a conversation with someone like him instead of someone who would get disproportionately upset at those points.

Neither was slavery. Was that OK too? And to clarify (though it’s worrying this point needs to be made), I mean morally.

> throwing around certain bad words like fascist

Fascism has a very clear definition. It describes a particular set of behaviours and actions, all of which you can compare to reality and determine if it’s happening or not. It’s an objective word. If anyone is trying to “dismiss” anything, it’s the people pretending it’s subjective because they support its outcome.

I love how you one hand acknowledge your severe lack of ability and achievement. And yet at the same breath you confidently put forward to know better - than JBlow no less - what the game-dev-industry or world at large needs. Or that you'd even have the ability to gauge evidence for it(or lack of it).

What evidence would even qualify as proof that game-development-industry (or world at large) requires a new programming language?

What is the exact threshold of "suck" that you have to cross before you go "yup, we need something different"? Does such threshold even exist?

And how do you measure it?

> There are a lot of musicians and actors more influential than JBlow, does that mean I won't be a fool if I listen to their opinions on anything more important than what to eat for breakfast?

Is John Blow making bold opinionated statements about fine-dining or something? No? Then what are you even talking about?

Why are you constantly making shit up to discredit the guy?

This is NOT rational behavior, its some sort of ego defense: "like how dare he say bad things about C++, who does he think he is (just some one hit wonder game-designer, just got lucky!)? He has no idea what he's talking about!"

Except, he making statements about a language that he has used extensively for more than 25years at this point. And used it to ship large, intricate, largely succesfull hit-games all with their own engines where he has done bulk of the programming work.

That is to say, you can HARDLY find anyone more competent and suited to comment on deficiencies and shortcomings of C++, and how to improve them and fix them.

Now, just because he makes astute observations about various defects in C++ doesn't make him special, after all C++ is extremely badly designed mess, and it is very easy to do so, and thousands of people have done so.

What makes him special - is that he - has mostly delivered on this (stretching himself thin in the process), whilst also making a large game at the same time. This is very rare and exceptional.

> metaprogramming with #run is cool, I'm also fed up with cmake. But surely we don't need to throw away all of our C++ tooling for that? Nah, we probably need something more incremental.

Who is this council of "we" you're refering to? A council of average Joeys that haven't shipped anything of note and is more concerned with whats "cool"?

You have roughly zero idea what the actual painpoints of making and shipping large games are. His latest game does full rebuilds in 2 seconds, so he can iterate and make changes quickly.

There are no "incremental improvements" that can be done to C++ to suddenly make builds not take MULTIPLE MINUTES.

> JBlow is an entertainer, first and foremost.

This is what you have got wrong, JBlow is an exceptional programmer first and foremost, who also happens to be a pretty good at thoughtful gamedesign, and pretty good at doing public speaking, among other things.

> a notable part of the success of Braid was thanks to a contract with Xbox Live Arcade

Notable part of success is that he made Braid interesting enough to win "innovation in game design" at IGF. Winning IGF ment he got contract with XLA (interested in making money and promoting platform) This is a deterministic process, there's no dice rolls or lottery draws involved here. If you're exceptional and you make exceptional things you succeed sooner or later, statistically speaking.

The whole thought process that if you spawned another much younger JBlow in 2026, he would be attempting to make another verbatim Braid, instead of something completely different - way more attuned to current market conditions is not very bright. He (the young JBlow clone) might not even choose to do games in these market conditions, he might chose to do exceptional, highly influential work in a completely different domain.

What however is highly likely is that he'd be highly, highly successful at whatever it is. Because highly exceptional hardworking people just succeed (unless they are born in Mumbai or Karachi)

I mean, if you're born as an average Joey, instead of being born exceptional, it is _luck_. After all, who would choose to be average when they can be exceptional and bright?

But it is important to acknowledge at which point luck materializes. And the lucky event wasn't XLA at 2008, the lucky event is beign born exceptional.

Most people would call being born rich a luxury. And not - being born exceptional and applying the said talent and hard work to ever more ambitious projects.

> Even John Carmack didn't really succeed in rockets.

He was very successful at engineering aspects of rocketry considering his very small and completely self funded budget. Just not comfortable burning 1mil of his personal funds / retirment money per year (that was still considerable money to burn out of personal stash in 2007/2008)

This is a very bad example you're using here.

That is wrong, slaves were happy to be alive instead of killed in most societies. It wasn't "slavery or freedom" it was "slavery or death" in most cases. America is an exception there, but in most areas with slavery it was done to criminals that otherwise would have gotten the death penalty.

Christianity forbade enslaving Christians, so we just killed our criminals for the past thousand years, but before Christianity we practiced slavery as punishment of crime everywhere as people thought that was better than killing them.

I sincerely doubt a vegan would agree that eating meat is OK, but as a society, we agree that eating meat is OK. It might not be OK tomorrow, it might not be OK by some moral standard, but that's besides my point.

> That’s a really strange comment. What does that mean?

It means fighting for abolition then was a much tougher fight than the fight you have today.

> Of course I’m not, I barely use the word.

I may have misinterpreted your position to the effect of "look in the textbook, Trump is a fascist by definition". Indeed, I have seen "other people online" argue to that effect, and they weren't made of straw. If that's not the case, I apologize, but the point stands even if you're not the kind of person it should be aimed at.

This is "controversial" in that it's a position that is not well supported by evidence and he has repeatedly used his platform in the past to make unsupported claims to the contrary.

It completely neglects the actual history of the field of computing, even just the 20th century, where the field was filled with women.

It’s only once it became a prestigious field that women suddenly developed a “biological” inclination against it.

I of course get where you're coming from, but don't you think it is intellectually dishonest to try and police certain "obviously true statements"? Isn't it similar to banning kitchen knifes because they can be used to kill? Doesn't it put under suspicion a lot of people who are simply following their intellectual curiosity?

I would argue that the ideas you seem to be advertising can lead to similar societal catastrophes as the ones you're trying to prevent from reoccurring.

For sure, the misguided idea that men and women are absolutely, 100% the same, and that any other outcome than some equal distribution between males and females means there must be mysoginy and patriarchy at work (which I don't say you're proclaiming directly), has lead to a lot of real problems in the past decades. And that includes aggressive propaganda against males in general, and against some actually valuable male virtues as well as female virtues, in some circles.

You can say whatever the hell you want. Or you could spend 3 minutes actually looking at public information to see if you're wrong.

"not fully understood" -> "so we studied it" -> "here's what we found"

Besides that obvious point, the sentence you quoted says "not yet fully understood," not "we have no idea." Those aren't the same thing. We actually have substantial evidence pointing in a clear direction.

- The most egalitarian countries show the largest gaps, not the smallest. - Women exposed to elevated androgens in utero become more things-oriented despite being raised normally as girls. - Male and female monkeys show the same toy preferences we do. Nobody's socializing rhesus monkeys into gender roles. - A 1.28 standard deviation gap in every culture that emerges in infancy and grows as societies get freer is not what socialization looks like.

You're treating "not fully understood" as "both hypotheses are equally supported."

They aren't.

The evidence overwhelmingly favors a substantial biological component. Just because you don't like the implications of that, doesn't make it false.

Seethe harder.

Anyway, call it "defensive" all you want. It doesn't change the historical thread: You argued, at best, his views made the workplace unwelcoming; the data shows he hires women at parity. You're just backpedaling because the reality didn't match your narrative vibes.

All of the evidence is solidly on one side, so you’ve retreated to “we can neither confirm nor deny.”

I guess that’s progress?