Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

621–630 of 654 posts

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

#621

Post by mwcz »

sesm wrote: post #358
kjksf wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He didn't have to. He wanted to. Which is the same motivation as creator of rust, zig, nim, ruby, perl, python had. They all wanted to make a programming language better at something. So I don't see anything "hilarious" about it.

Rust was created on a Mozilla payroll to provide a C++ alternative with better concurrency support for the purpose of browser engine rewrite. Also, Rust doesn't have a 'creator', the person tasked with leading the project didn't have the authority to make the decisions, see https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/307291.html

Rust was a personal project of Graydon's for years before it was sponsored by Mozilla. It's perfectly apt to be included in the parent poster's list.

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

#622

Post by jodrellblank »

tialaramex wrote: post #558
jodrellblank wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> " you aren't innocent of murder just because you didn't intend that the victim would die. " You might be; from the UK's Crown Prosecution Service guidance website[1]: "Involuntary Manslaughter. Where an unlawful killing is done without an intention to kill or to cause grievous bodily harm, the suspect is to be charged with manslaughter not murder.". From Wikipedia[2]: "In English law, manslaughter is a less serious…

> or to cause grievous bodily harm The GBH (Grievous Bodily Harm) is crucial there. The intent only needs to be GBH which is way easier to prove, for example weapon use. The prosecutors don't need to prove intent to kill, the death is evidence that you killed somebody (except in the rare cases they can't produce a corpse, for which they have to do more work)

What if there is no GBH intent either? What if you are just being negligent or careless, like speeding while driving thinking you are a better-than-average driver and won't crash, or if you are not speeding and someone runs out in front of you, or if you are throwing roof tiles off a roof as you remove them while thinking people will see and hear what you are doing and walk around the pile, and you end up killing someone?

The death is evidence that you killed somebody, but you can still be "innocent of murder" (and guilty of manslaughter instead. In the UK). That's why there are so many varieties of manslaughter, to determine how culpable the person is, whether they were negligent, whether they were comitting another crime, etc.

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

#623

Post by bananaboy »

NathanaelRea wrote: post #215
EvilTrout wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blow and Muratori gained a following of engineers by bashing existing popular languages and engines, claiming they were all garbage. They both started this after the Witness came out, 10 years ago. Since then, guess how many games Muratori has shipped? 0. (He cancelled his announced game.) Guess how many Blow has shipped? 0 so far, but it sounds close now. These engineers spent their time ragging on other developers…

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…

Casey hasn’t worked on game engine or engine tech in almost a decade. That’s not to say he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but imho it’s important to be aware that he hasn’t worked on a real shipping product in a long time.

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

#625

Post by __alexs »

psyopsy wrote: post #612
__alexs wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't control for the social conditioning of gender. This is so fundamentally obvious I don't think you are taking the science seriously.

Congrats! You've made your position unfalsifiable. When the data consistently shows gaps widening as social strictures loosen, and your response is to blame an invisible, unmeasurable "conditioning," you aren't doing science at all. But you are insulating your belief from any possible counter-evidence.

No I'm just clear that the current state of science makes it impossible to draw the conclusion that you are.

Note that this outcome goes both ways. We can neither confirm that biology is the main driver nor confirm that it isn't. Life is not as certain as you want it to be.

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

#626

Post by __alexs »

psyopsy wrote: post #613
__alexs wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem very defensive of Blow. I didn't say the things you seem to think I was saying. Sorry for the confusion.

Am I supposed to be embarrassed for defending someone against a baseless smear? 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.

I still don't think those are contradictory. If some women that worked with him share their opinion I'll readjust.

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

#627

Post by incrudible »

krapp wrote: post #441
incrudible wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reads as if the process and the finished work are somehow separable. If your code is a mess that you hate working on, it seeps through to your design and your design process. I too had a brief period where, for example, I thought dynamic typing lessens friction, but in reality it just causes massively more friction down the line. Many people never get to go down the line, so that is fine for them, but not me.

>This reads as if the process and the finished work are somehow separable. If your code is a mess that you hate working on, it seeps through to your design and your design process. 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. W…

There's a fair bit of survivorship bias in there. Few games are considered "great". Roughly half the games get canned during development. So while it may be impossible to make any game in a reasonable amount of time without creating some sort of mess, nobody would argue that a worse process isn't detrimental to the project. It could be the difference between a game being good-but-flawed and a masterpiece, or between "not salvageable" and "shippable".

Moreover, the "survivability" of the process goes beyond just one project. Jon got so burned out on the C++ language that he'd rather create his own language for the next project than use it again. If he didn't have to do that, he'd likely be working on the next title already.

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

#628

Post by zozzle »

tialaramex wrote: post #569
zozzle wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but that definitely seems to accurately describe the arc Rowling has taken over the last 7-8 years. What a bizarre time we are living in when "men aren't women" and "women should have single-sex spaces and rape crisis centres" are considered extreme views.

Women who insist that they specifically get to decide who is or isn't a woman and what women believe aren't new. Phyllis Schlafly managed to ensure the Equal Rights Amendment didn't pass on this same basis. Phyllis would fly from city to city, addressing crowds of women to tell them that women should be at home looking after their kids, not um, flying from city to city making political addresses like she did... Bewar…

Phyllis Schlafly is an odd comparison to make. She argued that women should stay in traditional roles and out of public life (while as you mention, not following her own advice), whereas JKR and other feminists take the exact opposite view. Not sure I see the relevance of your analogy here.

As for Bang Face last year, what happened is that security staff kicked a group of males out from the women's toilets. I agree that this isn't an ideal outcome, much better would have been if these men had respected that women's spaces are not for them, and stayed out in the first place. The fact that their removal was treated as some sort of scandal shows how far we've lost sight of the rights of women and girls to have single-sex provisions.

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

#629

Post by pwdisswordfishy »

0xdeadbeefbabe wrote: post #258
EvilTrout wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blow and Muratori gained a following of engineers by bashing existing popular languages and engines, claiming they were all garbage. They both started this after the Witness came out, 10 years ago. Since then, guess how many games Muratori has shipped? 0. (He cancelled his announced game.) Guess how many Blow has shipped? 0 so far, but it sounds close now. These engineers spent their time ragging on other developers…

The clean code guy hasn't shipped any game either.

And his advice is also crap.

https://qntm.org/clean

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

#630

Post by Johanx64 »

AndriyKunitsyn wrote: post #614
Johanx64 wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some people don't have the luxury of preaching for whatever ideals they have without a need to release anything in 10 years Wait, how did they gain this "luxury"? Are they trust fund babies or something? Or did they earn their big stash of money by producing "garbage" and now retroactively are preaching ideals that they themselves didn't follow or what? This line of "criticism" doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Af…

>Or did they earn their big stash of money by producing "garbage" and now retroactively are preaching ideals that they themselves didn't follow or what? In the JBlow case - yes, he made his money using C++. So far, he hasn't shown that using Jai is particularly productive for software engineering.

> So far, he hasn't shown that using Jai is particularly productive for software engineering.

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.

Post reply on HN