by Johanx64 | 2026-01-05 13:49:02+00:00
> That the game development industry requires a new programming language. So far, the evidence for that is slim.

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 (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 not and is therefore concerned with whats "cool"?

You have 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 XBLA (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.