Wait. Why two thirds of the languages you list pretty damned popular?
What point are you trying to make. The first sentence, or the second?
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Jonathan Blow is designing his own programming language for game development
- Thread starter freakybj
- Start date
What point are you trying to make. The first sentence, or the second?
But who will join on board with him? For this to gain any traction he will need a TON of support or make this the easiest language for new game developers to jump into (which would probably mean having an engine to make games like Unity or Unreal).
I don't see anyone putting the time and effort to make this happen except him. Hope it works out in the end.
I don't see anyone putting the time and effort to make this happen except him. Hope it works out in the end.
I grew up with Forth, Fortran, cOBOL and BASIC.
I will say that a deep understanding of BASIC isn't as useless as I assumed it would be since it's very easy to understand basic logic flows and debugging principles. I used to edit and create BASIC games and Apps for a computer magazine in the early nineties that came with a covermounted tape as well as pages of (Amstrad) BASIC users could type in if they had the patience.
Simple typos could cause the entire program to fail and we'd run checksums against the finished code time and time again , but were at the mercy of Ventura and Quark text box overflow .
Also I lived alongside dinosaurs.
Pretty much.
When you do something to take away complexity, you create new issues. Take Unity for example. It lets non-programmers build games, but they run like shit on anything but PC (and sometimes even PC). I'm sure there are other factors, but people not understanding the intricacies of the languages leads to lazy, inefficient code.
I was the person who used to spend all my spare time typing in programs in to my C64 from my endless stream of magazines and books my parents were kind enough to buy for me. As a child, there was nothing more satisfying than typing in all that code and being rewarded at the end.. and learning so much in the process. It didn't do much for my social life though.
As a indie developer I prefer to work with C++ (I have my own engine), I think it is a myth that is difficult, the little extra cost in learning give you more control and performance. For example: emulators, operative systems and big games are made in C++/C.
When I have to work for others always is in C# + Unity and it is a nightmare, it is slow, you don't have any control in the program flow, you dont know how is managing memory, etc...
I expect that people who defends C# and Unity, later will be not questioning why games doesn't run in 60fps. (this is joking, please don't take seriously :P)
About the Jai language, I usually watch the videos and it's pretty similar to C++, it uses the same LLVM.
When I have to work for others always is in C# + Unity and it is a nightmare, it is slow, you don't have any control in the program flow, you dont know how is managing memory, etc...
I expect that people who defends C# and Unity, later will be not questioning why games doesn't run in 60fps. (this is joking, please don't take seriously :P)
About the Jai language, I usually watch the videos and it's pretty similar to C++, it uses the same LLVM.
Which they then abandoned because they had no way to share code with any other studio. Even their data definition language, which for most studios is a home grown domain specific mess, is a standard language these days.
We abandoned our custom scripting language for Lua, and although we took a performance hit, we unlocked a huge latent resource in our designers. Oh the things they made, that professional trained engineers then had to clean up, but still.
I'm not a fan of custom languages. Probably because one of my jobs is maintaining one that someone else designed.
What do you mean you don't have control over program flow? C# and C++ have very similar "program flow", unless you are an evil ruffian using GOTO :) As for speed, of course C# is slower than C++ as it is a sort-of interpreted scripting language versus pure native, but it's not at "nightmare" levels, as long as the programmer knows what's what (and recently Unity has been moving towards a compiler which turns the C# code into native C++ code before compiling, though it still won't be as fast as if it was written in C++ in the first place).
There are two different points, unless you purposefully misread them as one thing.
The first is that there are, indeed, a lot of programming languages, for multiple purposes, and some of them are very popular, yes, which is the point. The second is that most cool new hip programming languages that only serve to masturbate the ego of the creator usually end up unsupported and as a GitHub museum piece.
I was in the middle of replying to your post, but hold on a minute while I do a stop-the-world garbage collection to figure out what heap allocated objects I can return....
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...
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Doesn't that count as program flow? Not your code, or your thread, but the program itself.
I'm nowhere near his level of knowledge but this looks like a case of:
Having played around with a number of languages specifically designed to make game programming 'easier' (including BlitzBasic, Blitz3D, GameMaker's scripting language, GDscript from Godot, Monkey, etc.), I'm not sure why we need another, especially if it's not free/open source. I'm still interested to see what he's planning to bring to the table though.
He has a prestigious dick!? This revelation is definitely NSFW :O
A good developer can avoid those garbage collection spikes. But I don't call that "program flow", every code you write you have full control over how it flows and is organized, the order of how things run.
Generally you'd want to split different arguments into different paragraphs for ease of reading but thanks for the clarification. No disagreements with me.
FYI, I wasn't the only one to be unclear about your points
Sure. I was just trying to trick you people. It wasn't a brain fart at all. Trust me.
Jai is literally none of these things. It's not a language to make game programming 'easier' -- as in for beginners -- and the reference implementation will of course be released freely.
If you're really interested in seeing what he's brining to the table with the language, you have like (rough estimate) 200 hours of video content to catch up on.
At least it's virtually impossible to crash Unity, you don't have to deal with headers and such, and there's almost no compile time. It's not exactly versatile, yeah, but slow and a nightmare? Nah.
A little off-topic, but the latest ECS architecture + Burst compiler stuff is the most exciting development I've ever seen from Unity. They're basically changing the whole system to what it should be for efficient processing with native data types. I'm still not a huge fan of C#, but it's manageable and solid for higher-level work (big games need more than fiddling with bits).
Maybe it will be the spiritual sequel to the legendary Blitz3D.
Yeah, that too. I'm not quite sure yet to which games / genres ECS can actually be applied in a meaningful way but I've played around a bit with the stuff they put on Github and it looks very interesting at least.
From a layman point of view he seems to be trying to reinvent the wheel. At the end, the main issue about Jai is that the only person behind it is Jonathan Blow, and his main user and advocate is Jonathan Blow.
Programming languages live or die by its community. That's the reason why FORTRAN or Cobol are still being used today, even thought they where designed in times where memory was measured in kilobytes and computers by square meters.
Jai fits Jonathan Blow purposes to a tee. Problem will be the rest of the world.
Programming languages live or die by its community. That's the reason why FORTRAN or Cobol are still being used today, even thought they where designed in times where memory was measured in kilobytes and computers by square meters.
Jai fits Jonathan Blow purposes to a tee. Problem will be the rest of the world.
i feel like there are already a lot of high level languages that make stuff easy at the expense of it running like crap and leaving a lot of people like me kind of uneducated on good programming techniques
so i guess it would be nice if he made something that wasn't that
so i guess it would be nice if he made something that wasn't that
I think there's definitely a hole to fill with a modern compiled language. Rust and Go haven't really changed the landscape as some predicted.
Hard to believe "Jai" is going to be it tho.
Hard to believe "Jai" is going to be it tho.
This has nothing to do with my reply, the poster was implying that Blow stated that women are stupid and the first line of the tweet disproves that.
There is a world of difference between saying "I believe that women are stupid" and "I believe that there are biological reasons between gender difference in interests".
One is offensive and discriminatory, the other is ignorance.
I don't condone ignorance as in our days and age ignorance is a choice, if you don't care enough about a subject to document yourself than don't talk about it.
Still, the original poster wasn't saying that, he was telling a story that didn't exist in the tweet.
Opinions by people with a large following and a lot of clout in the world spouting misogynistic nonsense do need to be called out and held accountable for spreading such harmful views so publicly.
Your kind of willful ignorance is far worse for the world.
I think we need to prioritize our targets. Not many people are looking to Johnathan Blow for guidance in gender/STEM issues.
Ugh...I think most differences are imposed by society, are cultural. And have been for centuries. This has to change. Tweets like this one dont help.I hope it's so intuitive that even women can learn it.
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Thanks for the link! I'll give it a go when I have time to watch a 2 hour long introductory video. I still think the article could have given at least one example of where Jai outdoes C++ instead of a page full of "C++ sucks and this is just going to be so much better".
So ditch the old ecosystems and layers that people have already developed to provide programmers functionality with a small amount of code? All he's doing is building the foundation for another wobbly stack.
"A large amount of functionality with a small amount of code" also assumes a lot and withholds control from the developer which is the very thing he's calling out about the current C++ gaming development ecosystem.
More power to him, but I really believe he should instead rebuild that ecosystem instead of developing a new language. You don't have to use the current libraries and APIs to develop games.
He still has a large following of people that lap up his every word. He should be called out on this especially because he's talking out of his ass.
Then do it in Twitter where people will actually see it, instead of this topic and its few dozen readers.
I wouldn't say they abandoned it, they recently used it in The Last of Us's melee system and might be using it in Part II to as well.
It's not their primary coding language, but they still might use it for scripting purposes.
I guess there's no getting away from this sort of intentional thread-deraling, so all that's left is to congratulate on devaluing "misogynic" to mean everything/nothing, and move on.
Even minute differences in developmental testosterone have huge ramifications later in life. I'm skeptical of the people that think we have definitive answers on that subject. And I'm disappointed to see the derail on the first page of the thread.
Every sufficiently experienced programmer will do(or attempt to - for number 3) 3 things in their life:
1) Write their custom String Class
2) Write their custom programming language
3) Write a procedural universe simulator/generator
*Why not both.gif*
Burying your head in the sand doesn't make problems go away.
Definitive answers? How about real life examples? There are very successful women who have developed videogames. Uncharted comes to mind. One of the biggest most successful franchises in gaming history -something Mr Blow will probably never match in his career. Is she an alien from another planet? No, she's a woman.
Before i would have added "modify the bios character set glyphs" , "write a scrolling raster bars demo" and "write a MBR or floppy bootsector virus"... but... nowadays... i'm not too sure about that xD
Your first 3 are darn good.
Because at the end of the day you've done nothing but bother people. You're not changing anyone's mind here. You're not cultivating thoughtful, critical analysis of the world around us. You're trying to do so, your intentions are noble, but it's just the wrong place at the wrong time. You (and me, too) could have never posted in this thread and it wouldn't have made a difference, even slightly, in struggle of the perception of women in computer science.
Neat idea. Let the man do his thing. There worse way for rich programmers to spend their time.
C++ is not limited, which is why it's hard to use.
You sure about that?
[edit] Talk notes refer to a version of Lisp. Both GOAL and Racket are Lisp derivatives, but I'm pretty sure they're talking about the latter,
http://gamelabgraz.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Regitnig_Georg_Summary.pdf
I haven't watched it yet though:
https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1020368/Unsynced-The-Last-of-Us
I will never get the complaints about memory management related to c or c++. Manual memory management is a strength of C. Being able to tightly pack and design custom memory managers is precisely where speed comes from, being able to tightly align your cache hits and things of that sort. It also gives you flexibility to move beyond OOP schemes and design your own pre-oop schemes.
The problem with C is that it forces you to understand how your computer works. You get better at C, i find, the more you dive into microprocessor assembly.
The problem with C is that it forces you to understand how your computer works. You get better at C, i find, the more you dive into microprocessor assembly.
