Four Years of Jai (2024)

The biggest "crime" of Jai is that it (soft-)launched like an open source programming language and didn't actually become open source shortly. There are so many programming languages that did go through the "beta" period and still remain open sourced all the time. Open source doesn't imply open governance, and most such languages are still evolved almost solely with original authors' judgements. It is fine for Jai to remain closed of course, but there is no practical reason for Jai to remain closed to this day. The resulting confusion is large enough to dismiss Jai at this stage.

Yep. Same dilemma as Star Citizen. If both just threw their hands up and said, "Done!", today then everyone would agree that a great product had been released and everyone would be mostly pleased. Instead, development has dragged on so long as to cast doubts over the goodwill of the founders. Now, Jai is unusable because it's difficult to trust Blow if he's willing to lie about that and Star Citizen is unplayable because the game was clearly released under false pretenses.

Same story with the Mojo language, unfortunately.

To me this raises the question of whether this is a growing trend, or whether it's simply that languages staying closed source tends to be a death sentence for them in the long term.