Interesting article from gameindustry.biz about how Jonathan Blow is developing his own programming language Jai as an alternative to C++ for simplified game development.
A closed beta should be out by the end of the year.
The main flaw with C++, in Blow's opinion, is that it's a fiendishly complex and layered ecosystem that has becoming increasingly convoluted in its effort to solve different problems; the more layers, the higher the stack, the more wobbly it becomes, and the harder it is to understand.
With Jai, Blow hopes to achieve three things: improve the quality of life for the programmer because "we shouldn't be miserable like many of us are"; simplify the systems; and increase expressive power by allowing programmers to build a large amount of functionality with a small amount of code.
Currently, Jai boasts an improved productivity of around 15 per cent, but Blow believes that, given time, it could be anywhere between 50 and 80 per cent.
A closed beta should be out by the end of the year.