Blow made his own language because he's so eye-wateringly arrogant and thinks every language (that he didn't make) sucks, and only he is smart enough to design a better language for programming games.
Seriously, this is why he did it. His ego and arrogance is off the charts and if it wasn't made by him, he thinks it sucks (e.g. he doesn't like Linux, probably because he realizes Torvalds is actually smarter than him). He also doesn't like C++ or Rust, again, it's probably a good indicator he has a deep inferiority complex and so he has to prove he's the smartest person in the world by writing his own, "better" language.
I.e. I don't think he's making a programming language for some "love of creating", I think he's doing it because he has a deep psychological issue/insecurity, which drives his need to always be the "smartest person in the room", his arrogance, the way he dismisses others who don't agree with his viewpoints etc.
Even if you don't like Jon, calling Jai an exercise in arrogance is simply untrue. When he started making Jai in ~2014, there were very few viable alternatives to C/C++ in the systems programming space that offered the kind of expressive power becoming of a langauge built this century. Rust is great, but it prioritising correctness is not always the right choice, especially not for games. Jai introduced many ideas that languages like Zig and Odin ended up adopting.
It may not have a public* release but, over the last decade (starting pre-Zig/Odin), Blow has discussed it extensively in his videos[0], enough that even ~10y was possible for someone to make a toy independent implementation[1].
Still then, it's a stretch to say that Jai influenced other languages. How could it when only a handful of game-centered applications have been built by a handfull of devs?
Rust and Zig developed features by cutting their teeth on large amounts of real software, not by following one guy's personal project that has no source, no library, no spec available.
Jai, odin and zig's creators are all part of the handmade network, a community of programmers. You are vastly underestimating blow's reach/influence.
Odin's creator has credited Jai as an influence. You can see him in the comments of old jai youtube videos (videos that go into a lot of depth about the language design). Odin's syntax and features are very similar to Jai, the influence is pretty clear. Odin has other influences of course but you could say it's "jai but open source".
Lastly, jai is not open source but it doesn't mean it's not available. You can message blow to get access to it. Many programmers have used it. There are third party jai libraries on github.
I've never heard of Odin or seen any projects written in it, seen a company hire for it, or seen it discussed at a PL conference. There's no stable compiler for it, and no spec. Yeah, I'm just one person, so maybe I'm just in my own bubble, but these are hobby projects with a very small communities.
> Still then, it's a stretch to say that Jai influenced other languages. How could it when only a handful of game-centered applications have been built by a handfull of devs?
Lots of people have seen his talks about the language, so why do you think its impossible it influenced other languages?
It's unlikely that the Rust and Zig devs are looking at one guy's gamedev focused vlog compared to feedback from tens of thousands of engineers writing tens of thousands of public projects in Rust and Zig.
Have they heard of Jai? Yeah probably. But it's barely a drop in the bucket as far as the PL design community goes.
Oh, yes, the Rust team does "market research" and interviews people to see how they use the language, where the pain points are, etc. They have talks at Rustconf about how they gather information on how the language is used. Never seen them mention Jai.
> How has Jai introduce ideas if it’s not even released?
These are orthogonal concepts. Jai can or cannot introduce ideas, and Jai can or cannot be released. As of now, it is in fact so that Jai has introduced ideas, and has been released to a closed group of beta testers.
> How can we claim to know what it did “right” when only a few projects have been built in it?
To judge whether Jai did something right, in my opinion, it suffices to read the documentation and experience someone else programming second-hand and take advantage of its offerings, namely making programming less tedious, more enjoyable, more safe. It appears to me that you set the bar of usefulness or success too high for no good reason.
I've watched enough hours of his streams to know that this is NOT a reductive take. Blow is one of the most arrogant developers and game designers, and believes that nearly everyone else is an idiot.
He's somewhat Musk adjacent in his need to be viewed as smart (but I guess he does so least have way more programming chops than Musk, so I'll give him that).
C++ & Linux are world-changing tools, but C++ & Linux really do suck in ways that become more offensive with taste. Rust makes very different tradeoffs than ones gamedevs want.
Regardless, if arrogance drives people to make new tools then we should be grateful for that arrogance.
I think you're projecting a lot of your own complexes and insecurities.
He built a language for a very specific task: building games. There were quite a few requirements for such a language. Opinionated? Yes. But that's how you get new languages: by having opinions. Along the way he changed the design and the assumptions several times (e.g. built-in SOA structures are gone) while keeping the original goal in mind and using it to build a custom engine and a game while building the language (thus validating the choices made).
If/when Jai is released hopefully sometime next year, I do hope the documentation includes the rationale because he talked a lot about why other languages don't cut it in his opinion in the early days of development.
Eh, I can write that comment because it's fairly easy to see this side of JBlow if you've been following his work for a while. He is so naturally abrasive about other people's work, loves shitting on things he didn't make himself, loves being the smartest guy in the room, and also is a covid is a hoax, anti-vaxxer, Trump supporter etc.
I don't think I'm the smartest guy in the room, and that's OK. I realised a long time ago that ego/arrogance isn't a great quality and it's far better to have a strong network of friends and supporters, and that doesn't happen if you're an arrogant prick.
And yes, he built the language (which is totally un-needed) because the "idiots" who made all the existing languages, didn't make one as good as in JBlows brain. Despite the fact that there are 1000s of games which are far better than anything JB has made written in C#, C++, Java, Rust, etc. Did Larian need to write a new programming language to make Baldurs Gate 3?
Only JB is arrogant to think that only a new language is good enough for him to make a game with. A game that is just a modern spin on Sokoban and where he paid a bunch of other game devs to use their puzzles! You could write this shit in three.js and it wouldnt look or feel any differently.
+1 to all of this. I can no longer deal seriously with Blow's ideas, programming language, or games because he can't present any idea without being highly condescending and critical of just about everyone else. I'm glad I've never had to work for or with him, because he's the type of coworker or boss that constantly makes everyone's lives miserable.
Yes, you can do good things with shitty tools. And you could stop and say: this is enough. But then we would probably never have any programming languages at all.
Haskell exists because idiots that made existing languages didn't make one as good as in Philip Wadler's brain.
Go literally exists because idiots cannot use programming languages created by geniuses.
Rust exists because idiots who made all the existing languages didn't make one as good as in Graydon Hoare's brain. After all, all browsers on the market were built in C/C++, who is he to think that he could create a better/different language? Shut up and get on with the program.
C# exists because idiots who created other languages didn't create a language Microsoft wanted to control, and also weren't as good as the one Anders Hejlsberg's brain. After all, Java was already there.
Except Java exists only because who created other languages didn't create a language as good as the one in James Gosling's (and Mike Sheridan's and Patrick Naughton's) brain. Again, C/C++ had already been there, they could've used that.
Is Blow abrasive and shits on a lot of things? Of course. If you can't see past that to what he's actually doing with the language he's implementing, it's your problem.
> Only JB is arrogant to think that only a new language is good enough for him to make a game with.
Lol. I think this is the textbook definition of projection. He literally never said nor implied this in any way, shape, or form.
If anything, creating a new language set him back several years.
I've never had SQLite corrupt a database file, and given how widely it's used literally everywhere without reports of corruption, and the incredibly extensive testing methodology they use to ensure that, your issues seem very unlikely to have been SQLite's fault.
I've tested almost every LLM which will work on a modern iPhone and Apples models are universally terrible in comparison to almost every open-weights model, they're so bad it's a joke amongst devs who work in this space.
The only thing it's useful is super basic tasks like sentiment classification, summarization (sort of), or stuff like, "Does this message contain toxic/bad language, answer yes or no only".
The OP clearly didn't mean "hallucination" as a bug or error in the AI, in the way you're suggesting. Words can have many different meanings!
You can easily say, Johnny had some wild hallucinations about a future where Elon Musk ruled the world. It just means it was some wild speculative thinking. I read this title in this sense of the world.
Not everything has to be nit-picked or overanalysed. This is an amusing article with an amusing title.
IBM is a consulting business, not a software business. Their software sucks, and every actual software engineer knows it. IBM has a business selling to big, old, backwards enterprise businesses who wouldn't know good software from literal pieces of faeces.
What planet are you on? What relevance does this have at all? Computers don't need to go and fly somewhere, they can just be accessed over a network. Also, the location and traveling is irrelevant to the main point, that is, that computers far exceeded our capacity in Chess and Go many years ago and are now so much better we cannot even really understand their moves or why they do them and have no hope to ever compete.
The same will be true of every other intellectual discipline with time. It's already happening with maths and science and coding.
The one where computers don't magically run all by themselves. It's amazing how out of touch HN has become with technology. Thinking that you can throw something up into the cloud, or whatever was imagined, needing no human oversight to operate it... Unfortunately, that's not how things work in this world. "The cloud" isn't heaven, despite religious imagery suggesting otherwise. It requires legions of people to make it work.
This is the outcome of that whole "Learn to code" movement from a number of years ago, I suppose. Everyone thinks they're an expert in everything when they reach the mastery of being able to write a "Hello, World" program in their bedroom.
But do tell us what planet you are on as it sounds wonderful.
The amount of people it takes to maintain a server rack is minimal and low cost labor. Most of the money is spent on hardware and paying people to right software for that hardware.
Writing that software is becoming automated and it’s not hard to imagine that buying will as well. So you’re left with the equivalent of a plumber running your data center based on what automated systems flag as issues and other automated systems explain you the troubleshooting to go do. There might be a specialist they fly in for an insane rate (in the shorter term) if none of that works but we’re talking about a drastic reduction in workforce needed, and this is for the data center maintenance which not many companies have anymore since the cloud migration
The... article? There is nothing in this subthread about an article. It is an extension on what was asserted in a segment of an earlier comment.
At least the source of your confusion is now clear. I suggest you stop doing that stupid HN thing where you read individual comments in complete isolation. This isn't programming where an individual pure function is able to hold significance all on its own. Context setup throughout the thread evolution is necessary to take in. But you do you. We enjoy the hilarity found in watching the stumbling and grasping, so it's all good either way.
Honestly, just use PostGres. It's easy enough and will scale with your business, also it won't randomly lock or corrupt your database (I've had sqlite do this to me several times).
It doesn't scale out, only up, is a fairly big limitation.
So if you have a single DB server running sqlite and your server goes down, well, your shit is down and there is no failover. I.e. no built in replication or clustering.
It doesn't support multiple simulataneous writes (like PostGres and SqlServer etc).
No stored procedures or functions.
There is no real client/server architecture. i.e. if you have applications on multiple servers which need access to the DB then you're in a bad place. The database has to be embedded along with the application.
>It doesn't scale out, only up, is a fairly big limitation.
This is the main limitation. That being said you can scale out with projections if event sourcing is your thing.
>It doesn't support multiple simulataneous writes (like PostGres and SqlServer etc).
A process with a single writer tends to be faster because it reduces contention. You only need MVCC in postgres because of the network.
What's even better is you can query across multiple databases seamlessly with ATTACH (https://sqlite.org/lang_attach.html). So it's very easy to split databases (eg: session database, database per company etc). Each database can have its own writer and eliminating contention between data that doesn't need to have atomic transaction across databases.
>No stored procedures or functions.
It's an embedded database the whole thing is effectively a stored procedure. You can even extend SQLite with your own custom functions in your application programming language while it's running (https://sqlite.org/appfunc.html).
In terms of access by multiple applications etc, if it's read access you can create read replicas/projections with litestream etc.
I was in love with sqlite too, until it just started getting randomly corrupted/locked and I kept having to restore it, and I never worked out why it was happening.
I appreciate its "simplicity" but ultimately I hated not knowing why it occasionally just shit the bed and ended up in an unrecoverable state. I also didn't like having to roll my own recovery system for it. Now I just use Postgres for all my hobby projects and it "just works" and I've never had it lock-up or corrupt itself...
Your mileage may vary, but sqlite definitely isn't as stable as it makes it seem.
Seriously, this is why he did it. His ego and arrogance is off the charts and if it wasn't made by him, he thinks it sucks (e.g. he doesn't like Linux, probably because he realizes Torvalds is actually smarter than him). He also doesn't like C++ or Rust, again, it's probably a good indicator he has a deep inferiority complex and so he has to prove he's the smartest person in the world by writing his own, "better" language.
I.e. I don't think he's making a programming language for some "love of creating", I think he's doing it because he has a deep psychological issue/insecurity, which drives his need to always be the "smartest person in the room", his arrogance, the way he dismisses others who don't agree with his viewpoints etc.
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