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This is, of course, an argument against a strawman. I wish the author had not mentioned certain folks by name, because the analysis is interesting on its own,

by ezy 4y ago

This is, of course, an argument against a strawman. I wish the author had not mentioned certain folks by name, because the analysis is interesting on its own, and makes some good points about apparent simplicity. However, by mentioning a specific person, and then restating that person's opinion poorly, it does a disservice to the material, and basically it just devolves the whole thing. My understanding of Jon Blow's argument is not that he is against certain classes of "safe" languages, or even formal verification. It is that software, self-evidently, does not work well -- or at least not as well as it should. And a big reason for that is indeed layers of unnecessary complexity that allow people to pretend they are being thoughtful, but serve no useful purpose in the end. The meta-reason being that there is a distinct lack of care in the industry -- that the kind of meticulousness one would associate with something like formal verification (or more visibly, UI design and performance) isn't present in most software. It is, in fact, this kind of care and dedication that he is arguing for. His language is an attempt to express that. That said, I'm not so sure it will be successful at it. I have some reservations that are sort of similar to the authors of this piece -- but I do appreciate how it makes an attempt, and I think is successful in certain parts, that I hope others borrow from (and I think some already have).

benreesman 4y ago
I endorse your much more thoughtful and well-argued post than my knee-jerk response down in the gray-colored section below. John isn’t right about everything: he criticizes LSP in the cited talk, and I think the jury is in that we’re living in a golden age of rich language support (largely thanks to the huge success of VSCode). I think he was wrong on that. But the guy takes his craft seriously, he demonstrably builds high-quality software that many, many people happily pay money for, and generally knows his stuff. Even Rust gives up some developer affordances for performance, and while it’s quite fast used properly, there are still places where you want to go to a less-safe language because you’re counting every clock. Rust strikes a good balance, and some of my favorite software is written in it, but C++ isn’t obsolete. I think Jai is looking like kind of what golang is advertised as: a modern C benefitting from decades of both experience and a new hardware landscape. I have no idea if it’s going to work out, but it bothers me when people dismiss ambitious projects from what sounds like a fairly uninformed perspective. HN can’t make up its mind right now: is the hero the founder of the big YC-funded company that cuts some corners? Is it the lone contrarian self-funding ambitious software long after he didn’t need to work anymore?
- mrtranscendence 4y ago
  > But the guy takes his craft seriously, he demonstrably builds high-quality software that many, many people happily pay money for, and generally knows his stuff. He has made a few good games, but how has he done anything that would paint him as a competent language designer? Frankly, Blow has done very little (up to and including being a non-asshole) that would make me terribly interested in what he's up to.
  - benreesman 4y ago
    Paul Graham is on record that the best languages are built by people who intend to use them, not for others to use. FWIW, I agree. The jury is out on Jai, but it’s clearly not a toy. John emphasizes important stuff: build times, SOA/AOS as a first-class primitive, cache-friendliness in both the L1i and L1d. And he makes pragmatic engineering trade offs informed by modern hardware: you can afford to over-parse a bit if your grammar isn’t insane, this helps a lot in practice on multi-core. The list goes on. And “he made a few good games” is really dismissive. He doesn’t launch a new game every year, but his admittedly short list of projects is 100% wild commercially and critically successful. On budgets that a FAANG spends changing the color of some UI elements. And that’s kind of the point right? Doing better work takes time, and there is in fact a lucrative market for high-quality stuff. As for him being an asshole? He’s aspy and curt and convinced he’s right, which is a bad look on the rare occasions when he’s wrong. But Bryan Armstrong is on the front page doubling-down on such bad treatment of his employees and shareholders that they are in public, written revolt. This may have changed since I looked, but no one is calling him an asshole. A world in which a passionate craftsman misses on diplomacy while discussing serious technical subject matter is an asshole but a well-connected CEO revoking employment offers after people already quit their old job is “making the hard calls” is basically the opposite of everything the word “hacker” stands for. Asshole.
    - mrtranscendence 4y ago
      > And “he made a few good games” is really dismissive. He doesn’t launch a new game every year, but his admittedly short list of projects is 100% wild commercially and critically successful. How is that dismissive? He has indeed made a few good games, but making good games doesn't certify you as a language designer any more than it makes you a good plumber or equinologist. Hollow Knight is my favorite game of all time, immensely successful both critically and commercially, and yet if Team Cherry were to release a programming language I reserve the right not to be terribly excited about it. > But Bryan Armstrong is on the front page OK, Bryan Armstrong is an asshole. I can call two people an asshole. I can call more people than that assholes too, if it comes to that. > Asshole Because I'm dismissive of Jonathan Blow? Listen, if you want to fanboy/girl your brains out over the guy, be my guest. He just doesn't impress me all that much and I don't think "aspy and curt and convinced he's right" is anything remotely approaching an excuse for poor behavior. I've been told I'm on the autism spectrum, too, yet I manage not to act like an asshole. Though clearly you disagree.
mrtranscendence 4y ago
I don't think it's as much of a strawman as you're making it out to be. In his talk, Blow says that higher-level abstractions haven't made programmers more productive than they used to be, and appears to use this as an argument against abstraction. He doesn't say (as far as I recall) that we shouldn't use something like formal verification, but he does put the blame for bad software at the feet of abstraction rather than "unnecessary complexity". Or at least if that were his point he wasn't particularly clear about it.
anothernewdude 4y ago
If it had been anyone else I'd agree. But Blow is very much the strawman depicted.
arexxbifs 4y ago
Blow's talk does raise a few valid questions but is so full of factually incorrect statements, cherry picking and contradictions[0] I'm surprised anyone can take it seriously. It's also very hard, for me at least, to interpret the sum of his arguments in the talk as anything except "If you're not managing memory, you're not a real programmer." [0] https://datagubbe.se/endofciv/ https://datagubbe.se/endofciv/
yakubin 4y ago
Particularly since the article spends such a big chunk of its text talking about bounds-checks and criticising Blow for being against them, when in fact in his language Jai, as far as I know, bounds-checks are enabled by default, although you can disable them selectively when they are e.g. in hot loops. So it's not any different than say Rust in this regard. It's the strawman of strawmen.

by ezy 4y ago

benreesman 4y ago

I endorse your much more thoughtful and well-argued post than my knee-jerk response down in the gray-colored section below. John isn’t right about everything: he criticizes LSP in the cited talk, and I think the jury is in that we’re living in a golden age of rich language support (largely thanks to the huge success of VSCode). I think he was wrong on that. But the guy takes his craft seriously, he demonstrably builds high-quality software that many, many people happily pay money for, and generally knows his stuff. Even Rust gives up some developer affordances for performance, and while it’s quite fast used properly, there are still places where you want to go to a less-safe language because you’re counting every clock. Rust strikes a good balance, and some of my favorite software is written in it, but C++ isn’t obsolete. I think Jai is looking like kind of what golang is advertised as: a modern C benefitting from decades of both experience and a new hardware landscape. I have no idea if it’s going to work out, but it bothers me when people dismiss ambitious projects from what sounds like a fairly uninformed perspective. HN can’t make up its mind right now: is the hero the founder of the big YC-funded company that cuts some corners? Is it the lone contrarian self-funding ambitious software long after he didn’t need to work anymore?

mrtranscendence 4y ago
> But the guy takes his craft seriously, he demonstrably builds high-quality software that many, many people happily pay money for, and generally knows his stuff. He has made a few good games, but how has he done anything that would paint him as a competent language designer? Frankly, Blow has done very little (up to and including being a non-asshole) that would make me terribly interested in what he's up to.
- benreesman 4y ago
  Paul Graham is on record that the best languages are built by people who intend to use them, not for others to use. FWIW, I agree. The jury is out on Jai, but it’s clearly not a toy. John emphasizes important stuff: build times, SOA/AOS as a first-class primitive, cache-friendliness in both the L1i and L1d. And he makes pragmatic engineering trade offs informed by modern hardware: you can afford to over-parse a bit if your grammar isn’t insane, this helps a lot in practice on multi-core. The list goes on. And “he made a few good games” is really dismissive. He doesn’t launch a new game every year, but his admittedly short list of projects is 100% wild commercially and critically successful. On budgets that a FAANG spends changing the color of some UI elements. And that’s kind of the point right? Doing better work takes time, and there is in fact a lucrative market for high-quality stuff. As for him being an asshole? He’s aspy and curt and convinced he’s right, which is a bad look on the rare occasions when he’s wrong. But Bryan Armstrong is on the front page doubling-down on such bad treatment of his employees and shareholders that they are in public, written revolt. This may have changed since I looked, but no one is calling him an asshole. A world in which a passionate craftsman misses on diplomacy while discussing serious technical subject matter is an asshole but a well-connected CEO revoking employment offers after people already quit their old job is “making the hard calls” is basically the opposite of everything the word “hacker” stands for. Asshole.
  - mrtranscendence 4y ago
    > And “he made a few good games” is really dismissive. He doesn’t launch a new game every year, but his admittedly short list of projects is 100% wild commercially and critically successful. How is that dismissive? He has indeed made a few good games, but making good games doesn't certify you as a language designer any more than it makes you a good plumber or equinologist. Hollow Knight is my favorite game of all time, immensely successful both critically and commercially, and yet if Team Cherry were to release a programming language I reserve the right not to be terribly excited about it. > But Bryan Armstrong is on the front page OK, Bryan Armstrong is an asshole. I can call two people an asshole. I can call more people than that assholes too, if it comes to that. > Asshole Because I'm dismissive of Jonathan Blow? Listen, if you want to fanboy/girl your brains out over the guy, be my guest. He just doesn't impress me all that much and I don't think "aspy and curt and convinced he's right" is anything remotely approaching an excuse for poor behavior. I've been told I'm on the autism spectrum, too, yet I manage not to act like an asshole. Though clearly you disagree.

mrtranscendence 4y ago

I don't think it's as much of a strawman as you're making it out to be. In his talk, Blow says that higher-level abstractions haven't made programmers more productive than they used to be, and appears to use this as an argument against abstraction. He doesn't say (as far as I recall) that we shouldn't use something like formal verification, but he does put the blame for bad software at the feet of abstraction rather than "unnecessary complexity". Or at least if that were his point he wasn't particularly clear about it.

anothernewdude 4y ago

If it had been anyone else I'd agree. But Blow is very much the strawman depicted.

arexxbifs 4y ago

Blow's talk does raise a few valid questions but is so full of factually incorrect statements, cherry picking and contradictions[0] I'm surprised anyone can take it seriously. It's also very hard, for me at least, to interpret the sum of his arguments in the talk as anything except "If you're not managing memory, you're not a real programmer." [0] https://datagubbe.se/endofciv/ https://datagubbe.se/endofciv/

yakubin 4y ago

Particularly since the article spends such a big chunk of its text talking about bounds-checks and criticising Blow for being against them, when in fact in his language Jai, as far as I know, bounds-checks are enabled by default, although you can disable them selectively when they are e.g. in hot loops. So it's not any different than say Rust in this regard. It's the strawman of strawmen.