That's certainly the pragmatic call, but while admittedly I'd never heard of Braid or his other games before he started showing up my YT feed, his takes on programming culture are very opinionated and compelling. He could have focused on making games and lobbing criticisms like so many of us do, but he chose to act. I'd say that's worth something.
I'm not sure where the weight behind his opinions comes from, though. Braid and The Witness are both well-respected games, but they're respected from a game design perspective, not as technical accomplishments. If you told me that both games were implemented using Unity or Unreal I would have no trouble believing that.
And although it's certainly quite an accomplishment for a single developer to complete even one successful game, it's not like he's remarkably prolific, either. If anything, it seems like Blow's technical purism has been an obstacle to his creative ambitions. I'm sure he'd argue that the two are inseparable, that the mindset that enabled him to create Braid is also the mindset that led him to work on Jai, and that might be true. But I'm not sure why anyone else should desire to follow in his footsteps -- I think most people would end up mired in the desire for purity without the achievement to balance it out.
I might contrast him with Edmund McMillen, who managed to use Flash to develop two hugely successful, influential, and creatively distinctive games in the span of a couple of years. His approach is just as worthy of respect as Blow's, I'd argue.
> I think most people would end up mired in the desire for purity without the achievement to balance it out.
I feel too many game devs get lost in that instead of just focusing on making a good game. Just make the damn game - there are so many good engines and languages out there, why do you want purity when you don't have the freedom to pursue it?
I think a lot of programmers love the idea of being game developers but don't really have much of an idea for what to make, so they get diverted into developing a game engine or even tools to support a game engine instead. People can spend years on that. And that's a perfectly fine hobby. But it doesn't usually result in actually making a game.
My advice to people going down that path is: consider contributing to ScummVM, an open source roguelike, or a ROM hacking project for a game you already like. Scratch your technical itch on something that other people will actually play. It feels great, and it gives you a better path toward eventually building something that's totally your own. Trying to build your own game engine and game on top of it is like taking a plane to Nepal and just starting to walk up Everest with the intention of figuring it out as you go.
Sometime in '85, my mom is an administrative assistant at the local University.
She's an absolute wiz on her office's newly modernized setup with these "PC" things running Wordperfect all creating beautiful documents on nascent HP laser printers. She'd let me show up after hours to hunt'n'peck the final draft of my high school term papers on the setup. I knew so little about computers then, but i firmly believe the magic of this simple process and things like "reveal codes" planted the seeds for finding deeper insights into speedy software on slow hardware and how file formats work. She was so sad when it inevitably went to windows :-) Rest in peace Bruce, thank you for .. you.
I always feel like NASA has mastered the basic "under promise, over deliver" philosophy that keeps the lights on and the next missions funded. I'd love to be a fly on the wall at who they get to tap dance in front of the congressional committee or how they schmooze the decadal people to rise above the rest.
I started uni in 1990 and went from a kid in his basement banging away on a PC clone with Turbo Pascal 5.x to a place with this thing called "usenet" on a "VAX" running "BSD" off of tapes and the map of the "Internet" could just about fit on a whiteboard. I sponged off the sysadmins all I could learning about renoe, tahoe and all things in between. I had no cognizance at the time that the death of this amazing world was getting thought off just when i thought it was the greatest stuff in the universe. I read the demon book cover to cover when I had no idea what most of it meant. BSD, whether alive or "dead" will always hold a special place in my mind. It's only with the long road since those days that I can appreciate the tone of this article. Thanks OP for posting it here.
Agreed with this general notion however, I'd argue that unlike a standards body, a big driver for JSON's ascent to defacto standard were the legions of javascript developers working at every layer of a tech stack using it as a low-friction means to an end.
Absolutely agreed. I've watched lots of his long-form videos on all those topics and initially I was always scratching my head as to why he'd want to reinvent all these wheels from the molecules up, but as I watched more, I realized that he's a journey guy, not necessarily a destination guy. To his credit, he's attracted a similarly-minded following of contributors along the way.
The first half of the article started to feel like the XKCD "15th standard" meme, but at the end, the more nuanced point was presented: If you're already using Rust, stick with Rust. Carbon is positioned as successor language for those with large C++ codebases difficult to convert to Rust.
Interesting tact, and at face value that concession might undermine adoption given that Rust has a big head start and not hinged to a corp with a well-earned reputation for killing projects.
Technologies like WASI are coming on right now to do exactly this kind of access in the context of a sandbox. From what I can tell, they're going through a lot of the same progression of JVM and .NET IL back in the 90's and early 2k's but for whatever reason seem to be more openly embraced in all the places where WASM is gaining a foothold.
I'm just keeping my fingers crossed that this one sticks .. oh and, please make WASM run in a browser without JS :)
