Four Years of Jai (2024)

Jai's perpetual closed beta is such a weird thing... On the one hand, I sort of get that the developers don't want to waste their time and attention on too many random people trying to butt in with their ideas and suggestions. On the other hand, they are thereby wasting the time and attention of all the people who watched the development videos and read the blog posts, and now can do basically nothing with that knowledge other than slowly forget it. (Except for the few who take the ideas and incorporate them into their own languages).

It's a common thing in programming language design and circles where some people like to form little cults of personality around their project. Curtis Yarvin did that with his Urbit project. V-Lang is another good example. I consider Elm an example as well.

They get a few "true believer" followers, give them special privileges like beta access (this case), special arcane knowledge (see Urbit), or even special standing within the community (also Urbit, although many other languages where the true believers are given authority over community spaces like discord/mailing list/irc etc.).

I don't associate in these spaces because I find the people especially toxic. Usually they are high drama because the focus isn't around technical matters but instead around the cult leader and the drama that surrounds him, defending/attacking his decisions, rationalizing his whims, and toeing the line.

Like this thread, where a large proportion is discussion about Blow as a personality rather than the technical merit of his work. He wants it that way, not so say that his work doesn't have technical merit, but that he'd rather we be talking about him.

The reality of a project like this is that to get it right (which is by the creator's standards, no one else's) takes time. Add on top of that Blow and Thekla are building games with this to dogfood it which takes time, too.

Sadly, there exists a breed of developer that is manipulative, obnoxious, and loves to waste time/denigrate someone building something. Relatively few people are genuinely interested (like the OP) in helping to develop the thing, test builds, etc. Most just want to make contributions for their Github profile (assuming OSS) or exercise their internal demons by projecting their insecurities onto someone else.

From all of the JB content I've seen/read, this is a rough approximation of his position. It's far less stressful to just work on the idea in relative isolation until it's ready (by whatever standard) than to deal with the random chaos of letting anyone and everyone in.

This [1] is worth listening to (suspending cynicism) to get at the "why" (my editorialization, not JB).

Personally, I wish more people working on stuff were like this. It makes me far more likely to adopt it when it is ready because I can trust that the appropriate time was put in to building it.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY0ZmeYmyjU

One thing I want to add to the other (so far) good responses: They also seem to build Jai for a means to an end, which is: they are actively developing a game engine with it (to be used for more than one project) and a game, which is already in advanced stages.

If you consider a small team working on this, developing the language seriously, earnestly, but as a means to an end on the side, I can totally see why they think it may be the best approach to develop the language fully internally. It's an iterative develop-as-you-go approach, you're writing a highly specific opinionated tool for your niche.

So maybe it's best to simply wait until engine + game are done, and they can (depending on the game's success) really devote focus and time on polishing language and compiler up, stabilizing a version 1.0 if you will, and "package" it in an appropriate manner.

Plus: they don't seem to be in the "promote a language for the language's sake" game; it doesn't seem to be about finding the perfect release date, with shiny mascot + discord server + full fledged stdlib + full documentation from day one, to then "hire" redditors and youtubers to spread the word and have an armada of newbie programmers use it to write games... they seem to much rather see it as creating a professional tool aimed at professional programmers, particularly in the domain of high performance compiled languages, particularly for games. People they are targeting will evaluate the language thoroughly when it's out, whether that's in 2019, 2025 or 2028. And whether they are top 10 in some popularity contest or not, I just don't think they're playing by such metrics. The right people will check it out once it's out, I'm sure. And whether such a language will be used or not, will probably, hopefully even, not depend on finding the most hyped point in time to release it.

I get that. But if you want to work in relative isolation, would it be too much to ask to not advertise the project publicly and wax poetic about how productive this (unavailable) language makes you? Having had a considerable interest in Jai in the past, I do feel a little bit cheated :) even though I realize no binding promises have been made.

> would it be too much to ask to not advertise the project publicly and wax poetic about how productive this (unavailable) language makes you

All the "public advertisement" he's done was a few early presentations of some ideas and then ... just live streaming his work

As well as "a few early presentations" (multiple hour+ conference talks) Jon keeps appearing on podcasts, and of course he's there to talk about this unavailable programming language although sometimes he does also talk about The Witness or Braid.