7 ms·

Blow often makes fantastic points about development, and often completely misses the mark. He’s accomplished great things and has ideas worth listening to - bu

by sd9 2y ago

Blow often makes fantastic points about development, and often completely misses the mark. He’s accomplished great things and has ideas worth listening to - but also plenty of nonsense that’s presented indistinguishably. I felt quite strongly that the collapse of civilisation talk was one of those pieces of nonsense, and I’ve largely ignored it (despite listening to it twice). I’m grateful to OP for providing a more principled rebuttal. Don’t even get me started on Casey Muratori, who tries to do the Blow thing but doesn’t even get the good parts right.

bena 2y ago
Does he though? It seems like he just makes these broad critical statements then pisses off to continue to do nothing. I wouldn’t even say he’s accomplished great things. He’s accomplished some decent things. He’s released two games which barely qualify as games. They’re more like puzzles. You don’t need to play them ever again after you finish the first time. Braid is ok. And the Witness is just Flow. And then after that he’s been working on a programming language for the past decade which he hasn’t released to the public because “it’s not finished”. He got lucky and made his nut and ever since then has thought of himself as way more talented than he is.
- torlok 2y ago
  I think you're getting close to ad hominem. It should be sufficient to point out how little overall people like Blow have accomplished. Blow is a hard worker, and yet it took him and his team 8 years to develop The Witness, which as you pointed out isn't anything revolutionary. I think there's a weird form of elitism at play here. Working close to the hardware isn't hard. There was a point in my early 20s where I too felt like I'm better, because I know how a computer works, or that making games in pure C is harder than in C++. As an adult this is cringe. I work in embedded, and I can tell you there's enough low level programmers out there to threaten my job security.
  - xanthor 2y ago
    Have you shipped a commercial-quality 3D game engine and game? How long did it take you?
  - deanCommie 2y ago
    The Witness isn't revolutionary, but it is crafted with the care of someone who cares about the small details of 3D worlds. Besides being easily one of the deepest/broadest puzzle games of the decade, it is GORGEOUS, and filled to the brim with visual scenes that take your breath away. To me it's something more akin to the iPod. "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." was absolutely a correct way to dismiss it as nothing revolutionary. And yet it's perfect well-rounded craftsmanship WAS revolutionary. From what it seems, Blow is doing exactly the same thing with his next game too. And there's something admirable about that. I say this as someone who disagrees with 80% of what he says, but VEHEMENTLY agree with the remaining 20.
    - torlok 2y ago
      I'm not dismissing the craftsmanship that went into making The Witness. All I'm saying is that it's cringe to be so critical of other developers when in essence he spends an extraordinary amount of time on his projects, and hasn't shipped anything cutting edge or anything other developers can even use.
    - tuna74 2y ago
      I thought it was boring and not was not impressed by the visuals.
      - xanthor 2y ago
        That's not germane
  - bena 2y ago
    Blow routinely trashes software he’s never had to write. Single user software that is the sole focused application when it is running. It saves nothing of importance and doesn’t alter any system to any appreciable degree. You know what’s more impressive than The Witness? Any web browser. It has to deal with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML, SGML, SVG, etc. An entire runtime environment with garbage collector. A web browser can run VS Code. It can run Doom. It can be made to run The Witness. Blow does not remotely acknowledge the complexity needed to make modern software. He treats his incredibly small domain as the pinnacle of the craft.
    - xanthor 2y ago
      You take for granted that delivering the user value of a web application needs to be in the form of dealing with "HTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML, SGML, SVG, etc. An entire runtime environment with garbage collector." There is nothing inevitable about that.
      - bena 2y ago
        No, I'm saying the web browser itself is an incredibly complex piece of software that has to deal with a lot more than what The Witness does. I actually said nothing about web applications themselves. Don't mistake flash for substance. The Witness may be pretty, but it gets to throw away a lot of complexity. Even as a game, it's not terribly complex.
        xanthor 2y ago
        The only point of the web browser is to achieve the user value accomplished by web pages and web applications. My point is there's nothing about that problem which inevitably requires "incredibly complex" software.
        bena 2y ago
        If "achieve(s) the user value" by being an entire execution platform. Without the browser there is nothing for those pages or applications to run on. Try writing a web browser that can render even simple, static pages. Then realize you haven't even started writing anything close to modern browsers.
- yoyohello13 2y ago
  I do agree, although I do like him. I find it fun to listen to Blow’s rants and part of me feels like he is right to a degree. It would be nice if programmers knew more about the platforms they are developing on. But it’s pretty clear that Blow’s process does not make him particularly productive. The dude obviously works insanely hard and is talented. I can’t imagine how much he would be able to produce if he leaned on some abstractions.
- mjr00 2y ago
  > He’s released two games which barely qualify as games. Everyone's entitled to an opinion, but it's worth pointing out that Braid is not only widely considered one of the best games ever made[0], its success was also instrumental in the explosion of indie games in the late 00s/10s. The Witness didn't quite reach the same heights, but it got an 87 on Metacritic and was a financial success. Even if it's only two games, that's a much stronger resume than most. You can argue that he takes too long to develop games, but other studios also take 8 years to make games and come out with Concord or Dragon Age: Veilguard. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_considered_the_best https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_considered...
  - bluefirebrand 2y ago
    > Braid is not only widely considered one of the best games ever made[0] The source here is a wikipedia article containing "A list of video games that multiple have considered to be among the best of all time" I don't know anyone who is into gaming that takes the opinions of "video game journalists or magazines" seriously anymore. They are so obviously just a marketing extension of the videogame industry that you can't trust anything they say. Look at recent developments with Dragon Age Inquisition. Reviewers gave it great scores, but it flopped hard enough that Bioware had huge layoffs [0] Braid is a game that people barely remember exists today, and in another 10 years it will be even more obscure. It is not remotely an all time great > its success was also instrumental in the explosion of indie games in the late 00s/10s Don't give Braid too much credit here, it caught the indie game wave at the start but the wave was coming either way. The explosion happened at the same time Braid came out, not years later inspired by its success. [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2025/02/02/after-dragon-age-the-veilguard-layoffs-bioware-has-under-100-employees/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2025/02/02/after-drag...
    - jcranmer 2y ago
      > Look at recent developments with Dragon Age Inquisition. Reviewers gave it great scores, but it flopped hard enough that Bioware had huge layoffs [0] First off, it's Dragon Age: Veilguard, not Dragon Age: Inquisition. Second off, it's had a better release (in terms of sales X days from launch) than literally every other Dragon Age came to date. While it's true that it underperformed expectations, that's more because the expectations were ludicrous to begin with, and the actual performance can hardly be called a flop.
wanderlust123 2y ago
What do you disagree with Casey Muratori on specifically? I have seen some of his content and he seems pretty humble but opinionated on things he knows about. I also think he did a great job with handmade hero.
- jiggawatts 2y ago
  Personally I find that Casey presents simple hard facts that rile people up, but at that point they're doing... what? Arguing with facts? He had a particularly pointed rant about how some ancient developer tools on a 40 MHz computer could keep up with debug single-stepping (repeatedly pressing F10 or whatever), but Visual Studio 2019 a on multi-GHz multi-core monster of a machine can't. It lags behind and is unable to update the screen at a mere 60 Hz! [1] I have had similar experiences, such a the "new Notepad" taking nearly a minute to open a file that's just 200 MB in size. That's not "a small cost that's worth paying for some huge gain in productivity". No, that's absurdly bad. Hilariously, stupidly, clownshoes bad. But that's the best that Microsoft could do with a year or more of development effort using the "abstractions" of their current-gen GUI toolkits such as WinUI 3. This is not progress. [1] The whole video is worth watching end to end, but this moment is just... sad: https://youtu.be/GC-0tCy4P1U?t=1759 https://youtu.be/GC-0tCy4P1U?t=1759
  - masfuerte 2y ago
    Single-stepping is moderately complicated. I'm even less impressed with modern editors that can't keep up with typing. My first computer could do that. It had a 2MHz 6502.
  - jakelazaroff 2y ago
    If I only spoke Arabic or Russian or Chinese, could I write words in my language on those ancient developer tools? Or would I be limited to ASCII characters? If I were blind, could the computer read the interface out to me as I navigated around? If I had motor issues, could I use an assistive device to move my cursor? I'm not saying this excuses everything, but it's easy to point at complexity and say "look how much better things used to be". But a lot of today's complexity is for things that are crucial to some subset of users.
patrick451 2y ago
Muratori's main talking point seems to be that modern software is slow. I think he is 100% correct on this. It's absolutely insane how long it takes jira to show me a ticket or slack to switch chat rooms and that vscode can't keep with up with normal typing speed.
- saagarjha 2y ago
  He's right about software being slow. He's wrong about why they are slow or how to solve the problem.
  - TheMode 2y ago
    What is your opinion on the cause and the solution?
    - saagarjha 2y ago
      I think it's like asking why poverty exists. There's no one, easy answer. We have a lot of difference forces, many of them market or demand or incentives that cause software to be slow. Fixing this will require concerted effort, rewards for making things that are fast, and some sort of accounting for the externalities. Same as any other complex problem.
      - TheMode 2y ago
        Aren't you agreeing with Casey by saying this is an effort/cultural problem? He also does say that fast software can sell better.
        saagarjha 2y ago
        I agree with Casey that this is a problem. I disagree with his view that seems to mostly boil down to "let me at them chief".
dismalaf 2y ago
Agreed. Blow's taken the better part of a decade to make a game where he didn't even need to invent the mechanics and Muratori never finished a game he started a decade ago. Meanwhile if you use modern game engines (including stuff like Raylib) you can have a pretty decent result in a weekend game jam session, and you could probably make Blow's Sobokan game in ~6 months or so (especially with a team of ~10).

by sd9 2y ago

bena 2y ago

Does he though? It seems like he just makes these broad critical statements then pisses off to continue to do nothing. I wouldn’t even say he’s accomplished great things. He’s accomplished some decent things. He’s released two games which barely qualify as games. They’re more like puzzles. You don’t need to play them ever again after you finish the first time. Braid is ok. And the Witness is just Flow. And then after that he’s been working on a programming language for the past decade which he hasn’t released to the public because “it’s not finished”. He got lucky and made his nut and ever since then has thought of himself as way more talented than he is.

torlok 2y ago
I think you're getting close to ad hominem. It should be sufficient to point out how little overall people like Blow have accomplished. Blow is a hard worker, and yet it took him and his team 8 years to develop The Witness, which as you pointed out isn't anything revolutionary. I think there's a weird form of elitism at play here. Working close to the hardware isn't hard. There was a point in my early 20s where I too felt like I'm better, because I know how a computer works, or that making games in pure C is harder than in C++. As an adult this is cringe. I work in embedded, and I can tell you there's enough low level programmers out there to threaten my job security.
- xanthor 2y ago
  Have you shipped a commercial-quality 3D game engine and game? How long did it take you?
- deanCommie 2y ago
  The Witness isn't revolutionary, but it is crafted with the care of someone who cares about the small details of 3D worlds. Besides being easily one of the deepest/broadest puzzle games of the decade, it is GORGEOUS, and filled to the brim with visual scenes that take your breath away. To me it's something more akin to the iPod. "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." was absolutely a correct way to dismiss it as nothing revolutionary. And yet it's perfect well-rounded craftsmanship WAS revolutionary. From what it seems, Blow is doing exactly the same thing with his next game too. And there's something admirable about that. I say this as someone who disagrees with 80% of what he says, but VEHEMENTLY agree with the remaining 20.
  - torlok 2y ago
    I'm not dismissing the craftsmanship that went into making The Witness. All I'm saying is that it's cringe to be so critical of other developers when in essence he spends an extraordinary amount of time on his projects, and hasn't shipped anything cutting edge or anything other developers can even use.
  - tuna74 2y ago
    I thought it was boring and not was not impressed by the visuals.
    - xanthor 2y ago
      That's not germane
- bena 2y ago
  Blow routinely trashes software he’s never had to write. Single user software that is the sole focused application when it is running. It saves nothing of importance and doesn’t alter any system to any appreciable degree. You know what’s more impressive than The Witness? Any web browser. It has to deal with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML, SGML, SVG, etc. An entire runtime environment with garbage collector. A web browser can run VS Code. It can run Doom. It can be made to run The Witness. Blow does not remotely acknowledge the complexity needed to make modern software. He treats his incredibly small domain as the pinnacle of the craft.
  - xanthor 2y ago
    You take for granted that delivering the user value of a web application needs to be in the form of dealing with "HTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML, SGML, SVG, etc. An entire runtime environment with garbage collector." There is nothing inevitable about that.
    - bena 2y ago
      No, I'm saying the web browser itself is an incredibly complex piece of software that has to deal with a lot more than what The Witness does. I actually said nothing about web applications themselves. Don't mistake flash for substance. The Witness may be pretty, but it gets to throw away a lot of complexity. Even as a game, it's not terribly complex.
      - xanthor 2y ago
        The only point of the web browser is to achieve the user value accomplished by web pages and web applications. My point is there's nothing about that problem which inevitably requires "incredibly complex" software.
        bena 2y ago
        If "achieve(s) the user value" by being an entire execution platform. Without the browser there is nothing for those pages or applications to run on. Try writing a web browser that can render even simple, static pages. Then realize you haven't even started writing anything close to modern browsers.
yoyohello13 2y ago
I do agree, although I do like him. I find it fun to listen to Blow’s rants and part of me feels like he is right to a degree. It would be nice if programmers knew more about the platforms they are developing on. But it’s pretty clear that Blow’s process does not make him particularly productive. The dude obviously works insanely hard and is talented. I can’t imagine how much he would be able to produce if he leaned on some abstractions.
mjr00 2y ago
> He’s released two games which barely qualify as games. Everyone's entitled to an opinion, but it's worth pointing out that Braid is not only widely considered one of the best games ever made[0], its success was also instrumental in the explosion of indie games in the late 00s/10s. The Witness didn't quite reach the same heights, but it got an 87 on Metacritic and was a financial success. Even if it's only two games, that's a much stronger resume than most. You can argue that he takes too long to develop games, but other studios also take 8 years to make games and come out with Concord or Dragon Age: Veilguard. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_considered_the_best https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_considered...
- bluefirebrand 2y ago
  > Braid is not only widely considered one of the best games ever made[0] The source here is a wikipedia article containing "A list of video games that multiple have considered to be among the best of all time" I don't know anyone who is into gaming that takes the opinions of "video game journalists or magazines" seriously anymore. They are so obviously just a marketing extension of the videogame industry that you can't trust anything they say. Look at recent developments with Dragon Age Inquisition. Reviewers gave it great scores, but it flopped hard enough that Bioware had huge layoffs [0] Braid is a game that people barely remember exists today, and in another 10 years it will be even more obscure. It is not remotely an all time great > its success was also instrumental in the explosion of indie games in the late 00s/10s Don't give Braid too much credit here, it caught the indie game wave at the start but the wave was coming either way. The explosion happened at the same time Braid came out, not years later inspired by its success. [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2025/02/02/after-dragon-age-the-veilguard-layoffs-bioware-has-under-100-employees/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2025/02/02/after-drag...
  - jcranmer 2y ago
    > Look at recent developments with Dragon Age Inquisition. Reviewers gave it great scores, but it flopped hard enough that Bioware had huge layoffs [0] First off, it's Dragon Age: Veilguard, not Dragon Age: Inquisition. Second off, it's had a better release (in terms of sales X days from launch) than literally every other Dragon Age came to date. While it's true that it underperformed expectations, that's more because the expectations were ludicrous to begin with, and the actual performance can hardly be called a flop.

wanderlust123 2y ago

What do you disagree with Casey Muratori on specifically? I have seen some of his content and he seems pretty humble but opinionated on things he knows about. I also think he did a great job with handmade hero.

jiggawatts 2y ago
Personally I find that Casey presents simple hard facts that rile people up, but at that point they're doing... what? Arguing with facts? He had a particularly pointed rant about how some ancient developer tools on a 40 MHz computer could keep up with debug single-stepping (repeatedly pressing F10 or whatever), but Visual Studio 2019 a on multi-GHz multi-core monster of a machine can't. It lags behind and is unable to update the screen at a mere 60 Hz! [1] I have had similar experiences, such a the "new Notepad" taking nearly a minute to open a file that's just 200 MB in size. That's not "a small cost that's worth paying for some huge gain in productivity". No, that's absurdly bad. Hilariously, stupidly, clownshoes bad. But that's the best that Microsoft could do with a year or more of development effort using the "abstractions" of their current-gen GUI toolkits such as WinUI 3. This is not progress. [1] The whole video is worth watching end to end, but this moment is just... sad: https://youtu.be/GC-0tCy4P1U?t=1759 https://youtu.be/GC-0tCy4P1U?t=1759
- masfuerte 2y ago
  Single-stepping is moderately complicated. I'm even less impressed with modern editors that can't keep up with typing. My first computer could do that. It had a 2MHz 6502.
- jakelazaroff 2y ago
  If I only spoke Arabic or Russian or Chinese, could I write words in my language on those ancient developer tools? Or would I be limited to ASCII characters? If I were blind, could the computer read the interface out to me as I navigated around? If I had motor issues, could I use an assistive device to move my cursor? I'm not saying this excuses everything, but it's easy to point at complexity and say "look how much better things used to be". But a lot of today's complexity is for things that are crucial to some subset of users.

patrick451 2y ago

Muratori's main talking point seems to be that modern software is slow. I think he is 100% correct on this. It's absolutely insane how long it takes jira to show me a ticket or slack to switch chat rooms and that vscode can't keep with up with normal typing speed.

saagarjha 2y ago
He's right about software being slow. He's wrong about why they are slow or how to solve the problem.
- TheMode 2y ago
  What is your opinion on the cause and the solution?
  - saagarjha 2y ago
    I think it's like asking why poverty exists. There's no one, easy answer. We have a lot of difference forces, many of them market or demand or incentives that cause software to be slow. Fixing this will require concerted effort, rewards for making things that are fast, and some sort of accounting for the externalities. Same as any other complex problem.
    - TheMode 2y ago
      Aren't you agreeing with Casey by saying this is an effort/cultural problem? He also does say that fast software can sell better.
      - saagarjha 2y ago
        I agree with Casey that this is a problem. I disagree with his view that seems to mostly boil down to "let me at them chief".

dismalaf 2y ago

Agreed. Blow's taken the better part of a decade to make a game where he didn't even need to invent the mechanics and Muratori never finished a game he started a decade ago. Meanwhile if you use modern game engines (including stuff like Raylib) you can have a pretty decent result in a weekend game jam session, and you could probably make Blow's Sobokan game in ~6 months or so (especially with a team of ~10).