8 ms·

Blow and Muratori gained a following of engineers by bashing existing popular languages and engines, claiming they were all garbage. They both started this aft

Blow and Muratori gained a following of engineers by bashing existing popular languages and engines, claiming they were all garbage. They both started this after the Witness came out, 10 years ago. Since then, guess how many games Muratori has shipped? 0. (He cancelled his announced game.) Guess how many Blow has shipped? 0 so far, but it sounds close now. These engineers spent their time ragging on other developers for slinging bad code and doing things horribly, meanwhile those developers were shipping games and apps and all sorts of other stuff.

ferguess_k 10mo ago
I think I'll judge that by looking at how convincing their arguments are (some are not, I think), not by raw output. After all they already output a lot.
- stocksinsmocks 10mo ago
  Thus, by their fruit, you will recognize them. Heckling is a lot easier than creating. Personally, I think we have an over supply of “ideas guys“
  - christophilus 10mo ago
    Jai is a real thing that others are using. I wouldn’t say Jon is an ideas guy. He executes.
    - wahnfrieden 10mo ago
      Who is using it today? edit: Oh so others are not using it...
      - jstimpfle 10mo ago
        He wrote this whole game in it. Apart from that, a couple dozen or hundreds of beta-testers. Not sure whether the language ever gets released, maybe he's too worried about having to maintain it and not being able to change it anymore.
      - vinyl7 10mo ago
        I'm using it
NathanaelRea 10mo ago
That's kind of a rediculous assessment. "How many games have you shipped in the last 10 years" is the standard for how good your advice is. John has made two games + one soon in the last 17 years. Braid started off the indie boom, and the witness was a blockbuster hit. Casey works on game engines and optimization, and has an entire video series about writing a game from scratch. I agree that some authors don't ship any actual software and engineers should stray away from their advice, but this is not that case.
- bena 10mo ago
  To be fair, I had not heard of the Witness until well after it came out. Braid came out the same time XBox Indie Games. I will say, I do not find a lot of their rhetoric convincing. Especially for people who have never attempted to write the software they are criticizing. Blow only writes single player games that do not persist significant data to the machine. Nothing bad happens if your save file is corrupted. Nothing of value is lost if scene transitions have a bug. But they're going to tell me that hyper-scaled multi-user real-time software is written poorly? Also, I've been watching Muratori's Handmade Hero series. The deeper it gets into the game, the worse it gets. At one point, he's like "Ah, I dunno, we'll implement bubble sort because we don't have time to do any other sort." Followed by a diatribe about why bubble sort is a bad name. It's a fine name. Things bubble up. Second, merge sort is just as quick to write and faster. But in general, they alternate between speaking in platitudes and disparaging other software.
  - tialaramex 10mo ago
    What the hell language was Muratori teaching with that he doesn't have a sort? Even C provides a halfway useful comparison sort in the box† and they're so cheap they don't even supply the O(1) growable array type † It's named qsort, but despite the name it might not just be Hoare's "Quicksort". However it also won't be somebody's half-remembered bubble sort.
    - 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 10mo ago
      Handmade Hero teaches depth-first development. I'm not sure who it benefits
dsissitka 10mo ago
> Guess how many Blow has shipped? 0 so far, but it sounds close now. One, but it was something like three years late: https://store.steampowered.com/app/499180/Braid_Anniversary_Edition/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/499180/Braid_Anniversary_...
- hiccuphippo 10mo ago
  Was it rebuilt in Jai?
  - adamrezich 9mo ago
    No, it was not, due to time constraints.
cloudhead 10mo ago
And your point is? Shipping garbage is better than not shipping anything?
- azemetre 10mo ago
  Probably a nuanced point in what's the purpose for espousing the virtues of performance if you don't have the output to show it is worth it? If you want advice about making games would you rather learn from the person that routinely ships games or a person that shipped a game once 10 years ago? Is that a trade off worth chasing? "Potential perfection" with nothing to show for it?
  - jackling 10mo ago
    More like, shipped 2 hit games, which were both technological and artistic feats for their time. And developed a blazingly fast compiler. Casey also was a developer in RAD game tools developing animation tools. Their output is probably better than most industry developers. I understand if you don't like their attitudes and the way they attempt to teach/preach to other engineers, but IMO their work speaks for itself. I take their advice and try to apply it to my own work, because it seems to have work for them.
    - azemetre 10mo ago
      I'm not saying I don't like their attitudes but it's a viewpoint I am struggling with myself. I'm starting to realize caring about all these minutia of details that don't really matter for my professional goals. I know my software isn't special, caring about pumping out as much performance as possible when I just sling JS professionally feels a tad myopic? What is the point of it just continues the pattern of procrastination towards the actual goals I want to achieve? Does this also apply to them? What is the point of espousing all these supposed virtues when the output isn't that special? I mean Braid is still good, but let's not act like greener devs haven't put out good games too without all the jackassery baggage.
      - 10mo ago
mvkel 10mo ago
I think you'll find that most development -teams- ship about one game every decade. It's hard to find examples of that not being the case.
- jayd16 10mo ago
  What? Its about 3-5 years for a AAA game and you ideally pipeline things such that a studio is shipping somewhat frequently. Almost no one can front a decade worth of development without shipping anything. Where are you getting a decade from? Consoles ship more often then that.
  - mvkel 10mo ago
    How many games has Valve shipped in the last decade? Square Enix? Bethesda? Epic?
    - jayd16 10mo ago
      Valve: Underlords, Artifact, Half-life: Alyx, CS 2 Square Enix: so so many but at least a few FF14 expansions, FF15, Nier: Automata, Dragon Quest XI, Octopath Traveler, Kingdom Hearts III, Final Fantasy 16, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth Bethesda: The Elder Scrolls Online, Fallout 4, Fallout 76, Starfield Epic: Robo Recall, Fornite. Epic cancelled Paragon and Unreal Tournament and Fortnite is a live service game where they're constantly shipping content so its harder to define single releases but they have new money coming in from new content. And these are only from the main studio, not the dozens of games published by these entities.
      - mvkel 10mo ago
        These are separate internal teams, not one team shipping all these games. Your square list, for example, crosses 8 different studios. My original question was poorly worded; I meant how many games -per studio- are being shipped by these big cos?
        10mo ago
0xdeadbeefbabe 10mo ago
The clean code guy hasn't shipped any game either.
- metaltyphoon 10mo ago
  I truly despise the damage those books did to the SWE as a whole.
- _bent 10mo ago
  Untrue, there is a game (however it's not very good): http://cleancoder.com/space-war http://cleancoder.com/space-war
- pwdisswordfishy 10mo ago
  And his advice is also crap. https://qntm.org/clean https://qntm.org/clean
jackling 10mo ago
Why are they being criticized from the arbitrary metric of the last 10 years, when both had careers far longer than that? Jon's advice for software is the same advice he used when developing Braid and the Witness, which are both great games and for their time, technological feats, especially from an indie. Jon's production from the last 10 year isn't even due to bad software methodology from what I observe, it's mainly seems to be because his company is creating a new programming language tailored to games. This doesn't seem to be done to make money, but rather, to try and fundamentally fixed issues that he perceives in game development. It's a lofty goal, and the compiler itself uses the same software methodolgy that he argues for, and it's quite good. So I don't think this critism is fair. We should look at the arguments they present, and their multi-decade long careers as a measure of thir authority on this subject.
WhyOhWhyQ 10mo ago
I give Blow a little benefit of the doubt just because spending all of your money on your small business and seriously facing the risk of failure is pretty stressful. I'd be a lot meaner than he is if I were in his situation.
dismalaf 10mo ago
> Since then, guess how many games Muratori has shipped? 0. (He cancelled his announced game.) On one hand I'm sympathetic to this view point, on the other, he's done thousands of hours of YouTube videos and inspired a ton of programmers. > Guess how many Blow has shipped? 0 so far, but it sounds close now. Not going to lie, it's probably difficult being financially secure and still hustling like you're broke. I imagine it's more by choice (to do other things) than being unable to ship.
risyachka 10mo ago
>> claiming they were all garbage its not a claim if you prove it. Tt becomes a fact. Blow proved his point by making a full blown programming language where he fixed things he complained about like compilation speed etc. And then made a whole game in his own language.
- lawn 10mo ago
  Blow did not in fact prove that all alternatives were garbage.
Ygg2 10mo ago
I think Blow and Muratori are pure engineers (as defined here: https://www.seangoedecke.com/pure-and-impure-engineering/ https://www.seangoedecke.com/pure-and-impure-engineering/). Pure engineers deliver perfect and fast software somewhere along the Black Hole Era. Not quite heat death of the universe, but almost there. Impure engineers deliver "working" code in a deadline, for an arbitrary definition of working. Basically, The Worse is Better™.
- moosedev 10mo ago
  I broadly agree with the author’s point there, but disagree with the specific language he used. In my view, engineering includes those pesky non-technical considerations, like the business context and the human factors, which bring their own tradeoffs and priorities to the engineering decision-making. That is, his “pure engineers” are not really doing engineering, at least under my understanding of the term, whereas (some of) the impure engineers actually are! :)
deadbabe 10mo ago
The problem with people like you is you’re all about the money, all about the end product, never about the craft.
- Capricorn2481 10mo ago
  Someone can't honestly write this unless they aren't a fan of games to begin with. Are you saying the Clair Obscur devs don't care about their craft because they used Unreal Engine? There is a massive gap between Handmade Hero and a bloated, unoptimized game. It's one thing to be a purist that wants to do everything Handmade Hero style. It's another thing entirely to claim people who don't do that are hacks who don't care about their craft. There is A LOT to game development other than writing things from scratch. Casey has made great resources, but I understand OPs frustration. He's created a culture of devs that think people shipping games over 100mb are soulless profit chasers. Animal Well is awesome, but not everyone wants to spend 7 years making a platformer.
thenoblesunfish 10mo ago
These guys are more like artists than engineers, right? I don't care if my favorite band only releases one album a decade, if it's good.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
hbn 10mo ago
If there's anyone who I think deserves to be able to say "all existing languages/engines suck" it's someone who made his own language from scratch to make an engine with it from scratch to make a game with it from scratch to combat the problem.
z-dev 10mo ago
I don't much about casey, but jblow seems to have gotten popular partly because of the timing with live streaming becoming mainstream and also because people find his brash "tell-it-like-it-is" opinions refreshing. It's the same reason why people tend to gravitate towards guys like linus or stallman. Having opinions and not being a fence-sitter makes you interesting.

ferguess_k 10mo ago

I think I'll judge that by looking at how convincing their arguments are (some are not, I think), not by raw output. After all they already output a lot.

stocksinsmocks 10mo ago
Thus, by their fruit, you will recognize them. Heckling is a lot easier than creating. Personally, I think we have an over supply of “ideas guys“
- christophilus 10mo ago
  Jai is a real thing that others are using. I wouldn’t say Jon is an ideas guy. He executes.
  - wahnfrieden 10mo ago
    Who is using it today? edit: Oh so others are not using it...
    - jstimpfle 10mo ago
      He wrote this whole game in it. Apart from that, a couple dozen or hundreds of beta-testers. Not sure whether the language ever gets released, maybe he's too worried about having to maintain it and not being able to change it anymore.
    - vinyl7 10mo ago
      I'm using it

NathanaelRea 10mo ago

That's kind of a rediculous assessment. "How many games have you shipped in the last 10 years" is the standard for how good your advice is. John has made two games + one soon in the last 17 years. Braid started off the indie boom, and the witness was a blockbuster hit. Casey works on game engines and optimization, and has an entire video series about writing a game from scratch. I agree that some authors don't ship any actual software and engineers should stray away from their advice, but this is not that case.

bena 10mo ago
To be fair, I had not heard of the Witness until well after it came out. Braid came out the same time XBox Indie Games. I will say, I do not find a lot of their rhetoric convincing. Especially for people who have never attempted to write the software they are criticizing. Blow only writes single player games that do not persist significant data to the machine. Nothing bad happens if your save file is corrupted. Nothing of value is lost if scene transitions have a bug. But they're going to tell me that hyper-scaled multi-user real-time software is written poorly? Also, I've been watching Muratori's Handmade Hero series. The deeper it gets into the game, the worse it gets. At one point, he's like "Ah, I dunno, we'll implement bubble sort because we don't have time to do any other sort." Followed by a diatribe about why bubble sort is a bad name. It's a fine name. Things bubble up. Second, merge sort is just as quick to write and faster. But in general, they alternate between speaking in platitudes and disparaging other software.
- tialaramex 10mo ago
  What the hell language was Muratori teaching with that he doesn't have a sort? Even C provides a halfway useful comparison sort in the box† and they're so cheap they don't even supply the O(1) growable array type † It's named qsort, but despite the name it might not just be Hoare's "Quicksort". However it also won't be somebody's half-remembered bubble sort.
  - 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 10mo ago
    Handmade Hero teaches depth-first development. I'm not sure who it benefits

dsissitka 10mo ago

> Guess how many Blow has shipped? 0 so far, but it sounds close now. One, but it was something like three years late: https://store.steampowered.com/app/499180/Braid_Anniversary_Edition/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/499180/Braid_Anniversary_...

hiccuphippo 10mo ago
Was it rebuilt in Jai?
- adamrezich 9mo ago
  No, it was not, due to time constraints.

cloudhead 10mo ago

And your point is? Shipping garbage is better than not shipping anything?

azemetre 10mo ago
Probably a nuanced point in what's the purpose for espousing the virtues of performance if you don't have the output to show it is worth it? If you want advice about making games would you rather learn from the person that routinely ships games or a person that shipped a game once 10 years ago? Is that a trade off worth chasing? "Potential perfection" with nothing to show for it?
- jackling 10mo ago
  More like, shipped 2 hit games, which were both technological and artistic feats for their time. And developed a blazingly fast compiler. Casey also was a developer in RAD game tools developing animation tools. Their output is probably better than most industry developers. I understand if you don't like their attitudes and the way they attempt to teach/preach to other engineers, but IMO their work speaks for itself. I take their advice and try to apply it to my own work, because it seems to have work for them.
  - azemetre 10mo ago
    I'm not saying I don't like their attitudes but it's a viewpoint I am struggling with myself. I'm starting to realize caring about all these minutia of details that don't really matter for my professional goals. I know my software isn't special, caring about pumping out as much performance as possible when I just sling JS professionally feels a tad myopic? What is the point of it just continues the pattern of procrastination towards the actual goals I want to achieve? Does this also apply to them? What is the point of espousing all these supposed virtues when the output isn't that special? I mean Braid is still good, but let's not act like greener devs haven't put out good games too without all the jackassery baggage.
    - 10mo ago

mvkel 10mo ago

I think you'll find that most development -teams- ship about one game every decade. It's hard to find examples of that not being the case.

jayd16 10mo ago
What? Its about 3-5 years for a AAA game and you ideally pipeline things such that a studio is shipping somewhat frequently. Almost no one can front a decade worth of development without shipping anything. Where are you getting a decade from? Consoles ship more often then that.
- mvkel 10mo ago
  How many games has Valve shipped in the last decade? Square Enix? Bethesda? Epic?
  - jayd16 10mo ago
    Valve: Underlords, Artifact, Half-life: Alyx, CS 2 Square Enix: so so many but at least a few FF14 expansions, FF15, Nier: Automata, Dragon Quest XI, Octopath Traveler, Kingdom Hearts III, Final Fantasy 16, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth Bethesda: The Elder Scrolls Online, Fallout 4, Fallout 76, Starfield Epic: Robo Recall, Fornite. Epic cancelled Paragon and Unreal Tournament and Fortnite is a live service game where they're constantly shipping content so its harder to define single releases but they have new money coming in from new content. And these are only from the main studio, not the dozens of games published by these entities.
    - mvkel 10mo ago
      These are separate internal teams, not one team shipping all these games. Your square list, for example, crosses 8 different studios. My original question was poorly worded; I meant how many games -per studio- are being shipped by these big cos?
      - 10mo ago

0xdeadbeefbabe 10mo ago

The clean code guy hasn't shipped any game either.

metaltyphoon 10mo ago
I truly despise the damage those books did to the SWE as a whole.
_bent 10mo ago
Untrue, there is a game (however it's not very good): http://cleancoder.com/space-war http://cleancoder.com/space-war
pwdisswordfishy 10mo ago
And his advice is also crap. https://qntm.org/clean https://qntm.org/clean

jackling 10mo ago

Why are they being criticized from the arbitrary metric of the last 10 years, when both had careers far longer than that? Jon's advice for software is the same advice he used when developing Braid and the Witness, which are both great games and for their time, technological feats, especially from an indie. Jon's production from the last 10 year isn't even due to bad software methodology from what I observe, it's mainly seems to be because his company is creating a new programming language tailored to games. This doesn't seem to be done to make money, but rather, to try and fundamentally fixed issues that he perceives in game development. It's a lofty goal, and the compiler itself uses the same software methodolgy that he argues for, and it's quite good. So I don't think this critism is fair. We should look at the arguments they present, and their multi-decade long careers as a measure of thir authority on this subject.

WhyOhWhyQ 10mo ago

I give Blow a little benefit of the doubt just because spending all of your money on your small business and seriously facing the risk of failure is pretty stressful. I'd be a lot meaner than he is if I were in his situation.

dismalaf 10mo ago

> Since then, guess how many games Muratori has shipped? 0. (He cancelled his announced game.) On one hand I'm sympathetic to this view point, on the other, he's done thousands of hours of YouTube videos and inspired a ton of programmers. > Guess how many Blow has shipped? 0 so far, but it sounds close now. Not going to lie, it's probably difficult being financially secure and still hustling like you're broke. I imagine it's more by choice (to do other things) than being unable to ship.

risyachka 10mo ago

>> claiming they were all garbage its not a claim if you prove it. Tt becomes a fact. Blow proved his point by making a full blown programming language where he fixed things he complained about like compilation speed etc. And then made a whole game in his own language.

lawn 10mo ago
Blow did not in fact prove that all alternatives were garbage.

Ygg2 10mo ago

I think Blow and Muratori are pure engineers (as defined here: https://www.seangoedecke.com/pure-and-impure-engineering/ https://www.seangoedecke.com/pure-and-impure-engineering/). Pure engineers deliver perfect and fast software somewhere along the Black Hole Era. Not quite heat death of the universe, but almost there. Impure engineers deliver "working" code in a deadline, for an arbitrary definition of working. Basically, The Worse is Better™.

moosedev 10mo ago
I broadly agree with the author’s point there, but disagree with the specific language he used. In my view, engineering includes those pesky non-technical considerations, like the business context and the human factors, which bring their own tradeoffs and priorities to the engineering decision-making. That is, his “pure engineers” are not really doing engineering, at least under my understanding of the term, whereas (some of) the impure engineers actually are! :)

deadbabe 10mo ago

The problem with people like you is you’re all about the money, all about the end product, never about the craft.

Capricorn2481 10mo ago
Someone can't honestly write this unless they aren't a fan of games to begin with. Are you saying the Clair Obscur devs don't care about their craft because they used Unreal Engine? There is a massive gap between Handmade Hero and a bloated, unoptimized game. It's one thing to be a purist that wants to do everything Handmade Hero style. It's another thing entirely to claim people who don't do that are hacks who don't care about their craft. There is A LOT to game development other than writing things from scratch. Casey has made great resources, but I understand OPs frustration. He's created a culture of devs that think people shipping games over 100mb are soulless profit chasers. Animal Well is awesome, but not everyone wants to spend 7 years making a platformer.

thenoblesunfish 10mo ago

These guys are more like artists than engineers, right? I don't care if my favorite band only releases one album a decade, if it's good.

deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]

hbn 10mo ago

If there's anyone who I think deserves to be able to say "all existing languages/engines suck" it's someone who made his own language from scratch to make an engine with it from scratch to make a game with it from scratch to combat the problem.

z-dev 10mo ago

I don't much about casey, but jblow seems to have gotten popular partly because of the timing with live streaming becoming mainstream and also because people find his brash "tell-it-like-it-is" opinions refreshing. It's the same reason why people tend to gravitate towards guys like linus or stallman. Having opinions and not being a fence-sitter makes you interesting.