Jonathan Blow on Programming Language Design

Jonathan Blow discusses the design of his programming language Jai, game development requirements, and his critiques of modern software complexity.

Jonathan Blow, creator of popular games Braid and The Witness, talks with host Richard Feldman about programming language design - including the design of the programming language he's been building for game developers. Enjoying Software Unscripted? You can become a supporter on Patreon! patreon.com/SoftwareUnscripted Keynote & Tech Demo - youtu.be/IdpD5QIVOKQ ECS and Rust's Borrow Checker - youtu.be/4t1K66dMhWk "The 30 Million Line Problem" - youtu.be/kZRE7HIO3vk "A New Programming Language for Games" - youtu.be/TH9VCN6UkyQ?si=Z5cqazo4QU7AibzB Casey Muratori's "Performance-Aware Programming" Course - computerenhance.com/p/welcome-to-the-performance-aware File Pilot File Explorer - filepilot.tech/ Ghostty Terminal - ghostty.org/ Language Server Protocol - microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/ WebAssembly Integer Sizes - developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/WebAssembly/Reference/Numer… Cliff Click's Sea of Nodes Compiler IR - github.com/SeaOfNodes/ 00:00 The Programming Establishment 02:04 Metaprogramming 05:04 Compile-Time Execution 08:05 Language Feature Interoperability 10:53 Compile Time Execution 27:52 Cross-Compiling and FFI 31:04 Determinism in Programming 35:07 Balancing Power and Safety 40:11 Memory Safety vs. Performance 50:15 The Evolution of Software Performance 55:32 Performance Awareness 01:03:56 Dependencies and Version Control 01:14:54 Dependency Availability Risk 01:18:42 Memory Management 01:24:51 Sandboxing 01:30:23 Operating Systems