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Focus: A simple and fast text editor written in Jai

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Re: Focus: A simple and fast text editor written in Jai

#71
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I offered a very bird's eye view of what a newbie understood from the language, not a "unique selling point" because, like I keep failing to make you see, Blow is not trying to "sell it" to anyone.

See e.g. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/selling%20point > Blow is not trying to "sell it" to anyone. For that, he is doing a lot of promotion for his new language with all the youtube sessions and blog posts about it.

You see promotion, I see a guy that's excited about his project trying to give educational content to the next generation of developers.

If it's promotion for anything I think it's rather for his sokoban like game.

Re: Focus: A simple and fast text editor written in Jai

#72

It’s silly that these threads instantly devolve into weirdly personal socio-ideological debates about the merits of the designer, his personality, the community, and his unorthodox approach to the language rather than even a technical discussion. It seems like cloutchasing all the way down. I also recognize that I am participating in said dynamic.

How is criticizing the creator of a project a form of clout chasing? It seems important to know the philosophy of the creator of a project, especially when that project is not yet finished.

Re: Focus: A simple and fast text editor written in Jai

#73
post #9

It's interesting to look at the source code. However, I have yet to find a clear unique selling point that justifies the development of a new language and infrastructure, or clearly shows me why I shouldn't just use D, for example. Any hints?

I think there is a very clear open spot where Jai fits in otherwise why would google be doing the same thing with their carbon language. People want a better c++. It should compile fast, have all the low level stuff of C. Have Metaprogramming and introspection and including a decent library for basic stuff would be nice too.

What this really reads to me is why not just use Rust. Rust is useful for the things Rust was designed for. Some people love it and think its the greatest language out there and that's fine but a lot of people have used it and they either do not like it or they like it but they wouldn't want to use it for the type of work they like to do.

Having more languages and each influencing another is the only way we can get better and better languages.

Re: Focus: A simple and fast text editor written in Jai

#74
post #59
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, 'good' and 'bad' are inherently (too) simplistic descriptions. But imo, if we take the context in which J. Blow calls himself (and user of his language) "good" programmers in good faith, then it would be natural to call those fresh googlers 'bad' (again, in the same context of meaning for 'good' and 'bad'). Not because they are inherently worse people and aren't talented - but simply because the reason you stat…

I disagree. The context that Jon uses is bad = careless, good = careful in the sense that I will make sure I deallocate my pointers. Pike's argument is not about new hires being careless or incapable of writing tests or understanding dangling pointers and all that stuff. The whole thing about memory safety is an external requirement to the whole discussion that Pike was starting. At the time it was already well under…

>The context that Jon uses is bad = careless, good = careful in the sense that I will make sure I deallocate my pointers.

Well I think this interpretation is reductive to say the least, and as such i don't agree with it. So that's that

Re: Focus: A simple and fast text editor written in Jai

#75

It’s silly that these threads instantly devolve into weirdly personal socio-ideological debates about the merits of the designer, his personality, the community, and his unorthodox approach to the language rather than even a technical discussion. It seems like cloutchasing all the way down. I also recognize that I am participating in said dynamic.

What sort of technical discussion can we have if we cannot evaluate the software?

Re: Focus: A simple and fast text editor written in Jai

#76
post #22
post #9

It's interesting to look at the source code. However, I have yet to find a clear unique selling point that justifies the development of a new language and infrastructure, or clearly shows me why I shouldn't just use D, for example. Any hints?

Jai has a few unique features that are quite interesting. You can think of it as C with extremelly powerful metaprogramming, compile-time codegen and reflection, and strong template systems, plus a few extra niceties like native bump allocator support or things like easily creating custom iterators. There is nothing quite like it.

So, it is like Nim? Templates, metaprogramming, custom iterators, Nim's comp-time is also powerful, but I heard that 100% of Jai is available at compile time? How good is interop with other languages? Does Jai's syntax have some nice features? Syntax sugar like Nim's UFCS or list comprehension (collect macro in nim)? effects system? Functional paradigm support?

Re: Focus: A simple and fast text editor written in Jai

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

A good number of your bullet points are factually incorrect and inflammatory. But to reply in the style of Blow: what have _you_ released in the past ten years to talk all this smack?

I'd say my work has gone in the hands of a few million people and made their lives (mostly) better, along with what all of my coworkers did.

But most importantly, I'm not out there telling people that they suck, they're bad programmers. I'm not the one out there telling people that GC bad, memory ownership bad but also you're stupid if you can't free() memory properly. I'm not the one out there rejecting decades of PL theory, calling academics "believers" and "wrong" [0], I'm not the one throwing shade at every other language, and when criticized on my language, fall back to "uuuuh I make Jai for myself you don't have to use it"

Anyways, if you want a real systems language that's available today and that actually works, Odin exists.

[0] - https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1363913308865138689

Re: Focus: A simple and fast text editor written in Jai

#79
post #77

https://github.com/focus-editor/focus/blob/main/compile.bat : jai -quiet first.jai So... where can I find the Jai compiler?

Either ask very politely for years, or be in denial like half the Jai community that writes Jai but is never able to compile it.

Yes, there is a whole Jai community wiki made from half cobbled together knowledge (https://github.com/Jai-Community/Jai-Community-Library/wiki), and a super secret discord made for the super elite, non-compiler-having plebs are banned.

Re: Focus: A simple and fast text editor written in Jai

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

A good number of your bullet points are factually incorrect and inflammatory. But to reply in the style of Blow: what have _you_ released in the past ten years to talk all this smack?

Hmm seems like he was right about the ego part then.
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