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Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles

arstechnica.com

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Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles

#291

Post by legitster »

calmbonsai wrote: post #268
magicalhippo wrote: post #225

A side note, if you've played The Witness but not yet The Looker[1], you probably have been missing out. I quite enjoyed The Witness but The Looker was just great. [1]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1985690/The_Looker/

I played The Witness and didn't find it remotely fun. I've enjoyed all of Blow's other titles. I suppose I was coming in with expectations of a modern Myst and/or Riven, but it was not that. There was not enough active narrative to keep me engaged with the puzzles and there wasn't enough "reward" in completing them.

I thoroughly enjoyed The Witness, but it nearly collapsed under the weight of its own pretentiousness. Especially to your point, what counted as a "narrative".

Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles

#292

Post by iamwil »

arduinomancer wrote: post #247
NathanaelRea wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's kind of a rediculous assessment. "How many games have you shipped in the last 10 years" is the standard for how good your advice is. John has made two games + one soon in the last 17 years. Braid started off the indie boom, and the witness was a blockbuster hit. Casey works on game engines and optimization, and has an entire video series about writing a game from scratch. I agree that some authors don't ship a…

Did Casey ever finish the video series?

He didn't need to finish it in order for it to have an impact. Makers of FilePilot and Animal Well both attribute Handmade as being big inspirations for them to go the way they did. They said, they got the most value from the first 50 eps or so. You'll hear lots of them on the Wookash podcast.

Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles

#293

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

jstimpfle wrote: post #123
enqk wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He also had a 88 for a long time in his twitch channel name

I would be very surprised if this connotation was intentional of him. His name was "Naysayer88" for a long time, and I had wondered as well where that 88 came from -- maybe it was a rhyme on "Naysayer", which (ignoring the number) is an apt description of his ways and approaches. At some point he changed the name. I assumed the reason was he had gotten aware of the connotation.

88 means a lot of other things, so I wouldn't think right away that he chose that suffix because of 1488 specifically.

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

Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles

#294

Post by matthewkayin »

krapp wrote: post #41
piker wrote: post #10

I always find Jonathan Blow and Casey Muratori to be great educators and advocates on the “simplicity” end of the spectrum. Jonathan can be super abrasive and comes with some political baggage, but does a good job advocating against what he perceives as unnecessary complexity in software. Opponents would suggest his domain and cherry-picked examples create the perfect environment for his positions and that he does ta…

I feel like "simplicity" is often fetishized to the point of counter-productivity. Show me anything that either Blow or Muratori are doing that couldn't be done in an existing language or framework. People laugh at games with thousand-case switch statements or if/else chains but they shipped and the end user doesn't care about logarithmic complexity. And most of the time it doesn't even matter. What fails with games…

> What features in Jai make it superior to C++ for writing games specifically?

I know that Jonathan Blow can be abrasive and one-sided in his talks on programming, but I think we should be open-minded about Jai. Yes, he is making this language because he doesn't like C++, but you make it sound like he is hating on C++ just for the sake of it.

I mean, is it really so hard to imagine that someone might not like something about C++? There are plenty of people who think we could have a better systems language, which is why we have seen languages like Rust, Zig, and Odin pop up.

In Blow's case, he has said that he doesn't like Rust because he feels that satisfying the borrow-checker slows down iteration time[1], which is important especially in the early stages of game development when you are still experimenting with mechanics are where requirements and architecture are still very much subject to change.

As far as what Jai offers, it seems his focus is on making a simple but powerful language (contrary to C++'s ever-growing bag-of-tricks), with fast compile times (less than 3 seconds on a full build of his new game), better build and dependency management (no more cmake), and powerful meta-programming features.

In a talk on the language[2], he demos how he is able to use the language's meta-programming features to develop powerful code-analyzing and memory-analyzing tools.

These tools, in particular, hint at his philosophy: lots of ideas in programming like RAII, garbage collectors, and borrow-checking exist to save the programmer from themselves. He's not interested in this and believes that these features come with hidden costs. Instead of accepting those costs, he would rather have a language that gives him the tools to save himself.

Personally, I don't understand the hate. If Jai is a good language, then it will benefit all of us. If it's not, then his making it still hurts none of us.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4t1K66dMhWk [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdpD5QIVOKQ

Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles

#295

Post by troupo »

saberience wrote: post #111
gortok wrote: post #99

The folks that dismiss JB’s work by saying “this could have been done in ” are missing the point of why anything is done. If you are entirely utilitarian in how you approach making a game (as in this case) then you’ll want to create as little as possible to make the game. An existing game engine, an existing programming language, existing libraries, etc. If your goal is the economic return that making a game will (ho…

Blow made his own language because he's so eye-wateringly arrogant and thinks every language (that he didn't make) sucks, and only he is smart enough to design a better language for programming games. Seriously, this is why he did it. His ego and arrogance is off the charts and if it wasn't made by him, he thinks it sucks (e.g. he doesn't like Linux, probably because he realizes Torvalds is actually smarter than him)…

I think you're projecting a lot of your own complexes and insecurities.

He built a language for a very specific task: building games. There were quite a few requirements for such a language. Opinionated? Yes. But that's how you get new languages: by having opinions. Along the way he changed the design and the assumptions several times (e.g. built-in SOA structures are gone) while keeping the original goal in mind and using it to build a custom engine and a game while building the language (thus validating the choices made).

If/when Jai is released hopefully sometime next year, I do hope the documentation includes the rationale because he talked a lot about why other languages don't cut it in his opinion in the early days of development.

Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles

#296

Post by jstimpfle »

__alexs wrote: post #156
mariusor wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you share why these statements are controversial? They might be misguided or misinformed, but the underlying fact is that women are not as well represented in stem. Just because the reason it's more likely to be misogyny rather than any biological inclination, doesn't make it an outrageous statement in my opinion.

The difference in participation within STEM between men and women is not well explained by biological differences. Blow has repeatedly claimed that it is actually the primary factor and seems actively disinterested in other explanations. 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.

Is the opposite explained? I haven't read literature on the topic, and I'm by the way also somewhat of a sceptic of science on such topics, as a layman. But it seems super obvious that girls/women on average are not wanting to spend their teenage years in the basement programming geek stuff, like many boys/men do. In my experience, here in Germany, and you can probably extrapolate to the West in general, it's not like girls aren't encouraged to pursue programming or science. Men are, on average, just more willing to put in the hours of social neglect in order to become good at such things as programming, or also gaming, or whatever other fringe unsocial hobby. A big part of that is probably competitiveness, but also I believe there are more loners among men. Again, this is not scientific, just personal observations, also ideas I've picked up that I can agree with. I'm not even saying that it must be mostly for biological reasons (though I assume it is), just that there is a deeper reason for fewer girls to exist in tech than just "there is patriarchy and power structures and misogynist gatekeeping and shit".

Never forget that the social neglect is not exactly healthy, and programming isn't actually that prestigious and externally rewarding, except for maybe the compensation that you can currently earn in some places.

Adding that for example in math or other sciences, we are much closer to gender parity.

Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles

#297

Post by dymk »

Jensson wrote: post #281
dymk wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still then, it's a stretch to say that Jai influenced other languages. How could it when only a handful of game-centered applications have been built by a handfull of devs? Rust and Zig developed features by cutting their teeth on large amounts of real software, not by following one guy's personal project that has no source, no library, no spec available.

> Still then, it's a stretch to say that Jai influenced other languages. How could it when only a handful of game-centered applications have been built by a handfull of devs? Lots of people have seen his talks about the language, so why do you think its impossible it influenced other languages?

It's unlikely that the Rust and Zig devs are looking at one guy's gamedev focused vlog compared to feedback from tens of thousands of engineers writing tens of thousands of public projects in Rust and Zig.

Have they heard of Jai? Yeah probably. But it's barely a drop in the bucket as far as the PL design community goes.

Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles

#298

Post by wahnfrieden »

meheleventyone wrote: post #191
jstimpfle wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be very surprised if this connotation was intentional of him. His name was "Naysayer88" for a long time, and I had wondered as well where that 88 came from -- maybe it was a rhyme on "Naysayer", which (ignoring the number) is an apt description of his ways and approaches. At some point he changed the name. I assumed the reason was he had gotten aware of the connotation.

I agree that the number choice was probably unintentional but you'd have to really strain to make 'naysayer' and '88' rhyme so thats probably not it.

Why give him the benefit of the doubt? He also fervently defends giving sieg heils in public

Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles

#299

Post by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF »

torginus wrote: post #259
dagmx wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a comment, that often when people say things that are within your own political belief system, that people often don’t consider them political. But what is neutral to someone is not inherently neutral to others. Or even if it’s neutral to them, it’s still a form of political expression.

I think an important distinction has to be made between personal values and opinions, and politics, both in the confines of this discussion and generally in society. 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 a…

> Politics imo is the worst sort of tribalism

No it's not. Politics is the negotiation between two or more people who want conflicting outcomes.

> 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.

The Republicans are led by white supremacists and they hate me for being transgender. Please stop carrying water for them. Politics matters and shouldn't be dismissed as "sports" or "tribalism"

> competence is more important in politeness or vibes,

I've been a professional programmer for about fifteen years. You could stand to be more polite.

Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles

#300

Post by latexr »

jstimpfle wrote: post #236
latexr wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you so hung up on scrutinising Blow’s words to defend him, but then take the critic’s words with a broad general brush to dismiss them? 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.

Not scrutinizing Blow's words. One must be extremely careful when calling anyone fascist or similar labels. The burden of proof is on the accuser, not on the accused. It's obviously right to demand precision from the accuser, and to interpret whatever the accused said in good faith.

> One must be extremely careful when calling anyone fascist or similar labels.

Which I’m not doing.

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