JB's original claim, at least as I understood it, was that with LLVM and the like language tooling is now good enough that anybody can quickly whip up a language to their personal tastes with no PL background, and therefore the hurdle of novelty and generality required for a language to justify its existence is drastically lower than it has been in times past. It's a shame, but having his personal language be in closed beta twelve years later is pretty strong evidence against that thesis in a couple of different ways.
AFAIK, the language is and was used in JB's projects.
JB is just very picky about when he wants people to see things.
He doesn't want outside voices influencing him and he still has some things he wants to think through. Doing that mostly solo takes time - it's not like the PL is the only thing he has been doing
If you are fine with getting there 80% his claim is correct. That he's using the language for his games proves it to me. Of course, if you require it to be both open and popular to be a success you kind of reach a stalemate. In a world where everyone can quickly whip up a language I would expect most to be closed to the public anyway.
I would like you to elaborate on how still being in closed beta is an argument against the thesis. To me it just looks like avoiding feature-requests, nitpicks and community interactions for a product he doesn't even want to sell.
I'd agree more except that as far as I know (I'll admit I've not been following the development that closely) he's been significantly building it in public on Twitch. So he's happy to spend time sharing it with the public, and has been from the start; it's just taken a long time to get it to a usable state.
> If you are fine with getting there 80% his claim is correct. That he's using the language for his games proves it to me. Of course, if you require it to be both open and popular to be a success you kind of reach a stalemate. In a world where everyone can quickly whip up a language I would expect most to be closed to the public anyway.
I think we're firmly in agreement here, except that IMO the default for software that's not for public consumption is to throw it over the wall, put the source up on GitHub or something, and not bother with documentation, explanation, or interaction. A carefully curated closed beta is kind of the opposite of that. If anything he's spending more time promoting it than I would expect.
Blow's claim was that C++ sucks and that an alternative better suited for gamedev should be created. It's not like he's had good things to say about LLVM.
LLVM doesn't have to be great for its existence to make PL dev a lot easier. Codegen used to be a real pain.
The interesting part to me was always that he didn't justify Jai very much. He didn't assert that anybody else would want to use it, or that it would be universally better than C++. His claim was that he didn't need to: building a language is now so quick that he can make a language just for him, just because he feels like it. Everybody can have their own language frontend.
In fact reading between the lines of that video a bit, I think he might believe that general-purpose languages are poorly suited to his use because they're focused on solving other people's problems. But that's just me extrapolating.
Eh? It is not his duty to public his language. It is not like publish the language is the end of story, you need to deal with the flood of feedback, that not always from good wills. The drama could cause him to lost time, effort and motivation, and hinder his game dev process.
It is pretty understandable he needs to hold back before he releases his new game, or even more.
Is there a manual for Jai, or some info on how it compares with other languages? I find it hard to find resources on it - there's no Wikipedia page, and my web searches list some videos and random github projects?
Which means this website doesn't even know how HTTP 4xx codes work (406 is about content negotiation) and is also being rather pathetically pedantic about user agents.
So, to you polygonjs.com, I say, 469 Go Fuck Yourself.
If you are fine with getting there 80% his claim is correct. That he's using the language for his games proves it to me. Of course, if you require it to be both open and popular to be a success you kind of reach a stalemate. In a world where everyone can quickly whip up a language I would expect most to be closed to the public anyway.
I would like you to elaborate on how still being in closed beta is an argument against the thesis. To me it just looks like avoiding feature-requests, nitpicks and community interactions for a product he doesn't even want to sell.
> If you are fine with getting there 80% his claim is correct. That he's using the language for his games proves it to me. Of course, if you require it to be both open and popular to be a success you kind of reach a stalemate. In a world where everyone can quickly whip up a language I would expect most to be closed to the public anyway.
I think we're firmly in agreement here, except that IMO the default for software that's not for public consumption is to throw it over the wall, put the source up on GitHub or something, and not bother with documentation, explanation, or interaction. A carefully curated closed beta is kind of the opposite of that. If anything he's spending more time promoting it than I would expect.
The interesting part to me was always that he didn't justify Jai very much. He didn't assert that anybody else would want to use it, or that it would be universally better than C++. His claim was that he didn't need to: building a language is now so quick that he can make a language just for him, just because he feels like it. Everybody can have their own language frontend.
https://youtu.be/TH9VCN6UkyQ
It is pretty understandable he needs to hold back before he releases his new game, or even more.
this is also good: https://github.com/Jai-Community/Jai-Community-Library/wiki
https://github.com/Jai-Community/Encyclopedia-of-Jai-Example...
https://github.com/Ivo-Balbaert/The_Way_to_Jai/
https://imgur.com/a/uF2CxfT
Which means this website doesn't even know how HTTP 4xx codes work (406 is about content negotiation) and is also being rather pathetically pedantic about user agents.
So, to you polygonjs.com, I say, 469 Go Fuck Yourself.