[hyperbolablabla]

This is a very reductive take.

Even if you don't like Jon, calling Jai an exercise in arrogance is simply untrue. When he started making Jai in ~2014, there were very few viable alternatives to C/C++ in the systems programming space that offered the kind of expressive power becoming of a langauge built this century. Rust is great, but it prioritising correctness is not always the right choice, especially not for games. Jai introduced many ideas that languages like Zig and Odin ended up adopting.

[dymk]

How has Jai introduce ideas if it’s not even released? How can we claim to know what it did “right” when only a few projects have been built in it?

[forgotpwd16]

It may not have a public* release but, over the last decade (starting pre-Zig/Odin), Blow has discussed it extensively in his videos[0], enough that even ~10y was possible for someone to make a toy independent implementation[1].

[0]: https://inductive.no/jai/ [1]: https://github.com/Sharir/jai

*Although there has (always?) been a private alpha/beta release.

[dymk]

Still then, it's a stretch to say that Jai influenced other languages. How could it when only a handful of game-centered applications have been built by a handfull of devs?

Rust and Zig developed features by cutting their teeth on large amounts of real software, not by following one guy's personal project that has no source, no library, no spec available.

[andypants]

Jai, odin and zig's creators are all part of the handmade network, a community of programmers. You are vastly underestimating blow's reach/influence.

Odin's creator has credited Jai as an influence. You can see him in the comments of old jai youtube videos (videos that go into a lot of depth about the language design). Odin's syntax and features are very similar to Jai, the influence is pretty clear. Odin has other influences of course but you could say it's "jai but open source".

Lastly, jai is not open source but it doesn't mean it's not available. You can message blow to get access to it. Many programmers have used it. There are third party jai libraries on github.

[dymk]

I've never heard of Odin or seen any projects written in it, seen a company hire for it, or seen it discussed at a PL conference. There's no stable compiler for it, and no spec. Yeah, I'm just one person, so maybe I'm just in my own bubble, but these are hobby projects with a very small communities.

> Many programmers

...how many?

[stock_toaster]

I'm no fan of Odin, but JangaFX[1] apparently uses it quite a bit. I believe EmberGen[2] is written[3] in Odin.

[1]: https://jangafx.com

[2]: https://jangafx.com/software/embergen

[3]: https://odin-lang.org/showcase/embergen/

[Jensson]

> Still then, it's a stretch to say that Jai influenced other languages. How could it when only a handful of game-centered applications have been built by a handfull of devs?

Lots of people have seen his talks about the language, so why do you think its impossible it influenced other languages?

[dymk]

It's unlikely that the Rust and Zig devs are looking at one guy's gamedev focused vlog compared to feedback from tens of thousands of engineers writing tens of thousands of public projects in Rust and Zig.

Have they heard of Jai? Yeah probably. But it's barely a drop in the bucket as far as the PL design community goes.

[sesm]

So, everybody with a toy Github repo gets a sit in a Rust/Zig design committee?

Not sure about Rust, but Zig seems to explicitly follow Cathedral-style development model.

[bmn__]

> How has Jai introduce ideas if it’s not even released?

These are orthogonal concepts. Jai can or cannot introduce ideas, and Jai can or cannot be released. As of now, it is in fact so that Jai has introduced ideas, and has been released to a closed group of beta testers.

> How can we claim to know what it did “right” when only a few projects have been built in it?

To judge whether Jai did something right, in my opinion, it suffices to read the documentation and experience someone else programming second-hand and take advantage of its offerings, namely making programming less tedious, more enjoyable, more safe. It appears to me that you set the bar of usefulness or success too high for no good reason.

[Trasmatta]

I've watched enough hours of his streams to know that this is NOT a reductive take. Blow is one of the most arrogant developers and game designers, and believes that nearly everyone else is an idiot.

He's somewhat Musk adjacent in his need to be viewed as smart (but I guess he does so least have way more programming chops than Musk, so I'll give him that).