Jon Blow live-codes compilers and 3D rendering engines and shit from scratch on YouTube or whatever. Starting you essay by dissing him is not a great intro.
Add to this that John Blow is such an exemplar of the entrepreneurial spirit that this site has basically its foundational value.
The guy worked in the rat race for awhile, saved a modest amount to self-fund building Braid. Braid smashed every record both commercially and critically for what one guy in a garage could do in games.
He took all that money, hired a few people carefully, and built The Witness, not on fucking Unity or something, but from the shaders up so that it would have a unique look and not be a clone of something else. The Witness was also a huge commercial and critical success.
His most recent project is, uh, ambitious. I don’t know if it’s going to prove feasible. But I’m sure as hell rooting for success rather than failure.
Now mostly this is directed at the auth or the post, but you’ve kind of signed up for a little of this: what the fuck is your CV?
If Jonathan Blow truly does believe that there are "perfect" programmers who never, ever need runtimes that do bounds checking (and other useful things)[0], then that is a huge blind spot. Maybe these unicorns exist, but they are just that: incredibly, vanishingly rare. And Blow certainly isn't one of those people; I've played both Braid and The Witness, and I've seen them both crash (in game code, not in a linked platform library). They're amazing, beautiful games, but that doesn't make their author above criticism.
> ... but you’ve kind of signed up for a little of this: what the fuck is your CV?
Valid criticism/skepticism need not turn into a dick-measuring contest. Trying to invalidate someone's opinion by asking for their credentials is logically fallacious. Please don't do this sort of thing here.
Also not sure where all the anger is coming from. Why do you feel such a personal stake in Jonathan Blow's reputation as some sort of infallible coding god?
[0] Not saying that I know for a fact that he does believe this; I'm just going by OP's article, which could easily be wrong or at least exaggerated.
If you work in games then you know that John Blow is by many measures the most demonstrably successful game developer without a big studio behind him, others might not.
Talking about this stuff on the Internet is a sloppy, haphazard business: deep insight rarely fits in a tweet. I don’t mind that the blog author is not only saying ridiculous things but naming-and shaming earnest, serious pros into the bargain.
I mind that so many people on this site, which I do care about, are lining up behind that bullshit.
ex gamer here (player only, no idea about the game making industry), never heard of him or any games. Is he really the most successful? From the outside i would have guessed hte most successful indy game dev, based on how much they're talked about, would be something like: dwarf fortress, minecraft, flappy birds, wordle...
I've watched people live coding audio software. That's a performance, like jamming or rap battling where you make music spontaneously for an audience. It's a distinct skill from being able to polish stuff in a studio, just like playing a guitar or singing live is a distinct skill, it's even distinct from working with a loop sampler (like Marc Rebillet) although it's often related.
But for a compiler, what's "live"? Somebody writes some code and you... tokenize it in real time, transform it into some intermediate representation, optimise that and then spit out machine code? No? Then it's not "live coding", you're just talking about how he got paid to stream on Twitch or whatever. Loads of people do that. Ketroc streamed his last minute strategies for the recent SC2 AI tournament, he's not even a "professional" programmer, half his audience haven't seen Java before.