I highly respect Jonathan Blow. He is honest, practical, and expresses his thoughts eloquently.

When he says "this one is hard to explain..." you know the best part is coming. Valuable insights

This is a problem I have whenever I have to do programming for other people, and I think it's that has sunk it's roots into how the modern economics works. The problem being the "reasons why you shouldn't make a programming language" kind of mindset. Everything today revolves around reaching some arbitrary short term turn around time for the sake of growth. Forget about trying to actually make some sort of innovation or rooting out some inefficiency, just keep things afloat and don't rock the boat. Which is so weird. I always saw the birth of "modern tech" as a bunch of nerdy-ass cowboys taking risks, but nowadays it either feels so far from that, or a sort of "fake" version of it.

I always come back to this video. I don’t know anything about programming. This just applies and helps me with my own creative process.

I love hearing Jon speak because when he talks about programming or development he never names off any projects, languages, software, operating systems... only the point he wants to make and the words you need to hear!

This guy is pure genius. You might like or not what he says, but you can't avoid admiring him. We definitely need more people like him.

I know the feeling. Doing math, sometimes you look and just start computing. After 30 mins of writing towards the goal, youve computed or proved what you needed, but you need to reread yourself to understand what you did. Its like the unconscious takes over.

This should have been called "Jo Blow on Flow"

Jon motivates me to never give up on game development. He is a revolutionary. The future is bright.

6:30 That's one of the best explanations of what programming and, to an extent, math feels like.

a guy with vision, he knows what he's trying to make, and puts all his effort in accomplishing the core goal that matters in his work. This is what's lacking in many games currently

Ah, getting into The Zone. Well understood in many contexts but the depth and intensity of it when coding is on another level.

So far most of the criticism I've come across towards Jai is criticism towards Blow himself and is along the lines of "As a programmer with 30+ years of experience, I don't like Jonathan Blow and his games, so this language will fail". Complete ad hominem. I think he's designing Jai from a place of necessity but also humility.

Semantics before aesthetics is a good reminder. I too found less aesthetics help focus better when designing as it minimizes distraction. It helps focus on what really matters.

J.Blow critics often never made it far enough to understand why he does things the way he does.

First thing looked up but couldn't find was a video of Jonathan Blow dancing

I love that his approach to developing is like painting or other art. This is what people ahead of their time look like. Blow is the Van Gogh of developing.

Jon Blow is such a smart man. I admire his thinking.

"People are spending 8 hours a day of their life working with something ugly. Doesn't that matter?" Wow....this is a really great thought. Sometimes we make things needlessly complicated. I think it's an old school like of thought, like the whole "you've gotta work in shitty conditions and pay your dues!" But like ...why?

I am writing a programming language myself. this artistic flow state has happened to me once or twice before. I was similarly shook when it did. This is really validating to hear!

Really interesting hearing someone put words on that experience. I have been programming for 39 years and really can relate to this.

As a programmer (not on the level of Blow), I agree, this is very well put by Jonathan Blow. He's actually verbalized things about myself that I didn't know how to describe before.

"If you put your attention deeply into everything all the time, you would never get anything done" This is the story of my life! 😂

This video is fantastic, thank you so much for this.

What a beautiful video and a beautiful mind. He’s just as lost in his mind as we are in his work and it’s seriously so interesting.

Exceptionally said.

Completely agree with, on a small team basis, testing hard on the highest possible points of failure and having others dwell on minor issues during prototyping...so frustrating

Thank you! :D

wow. so much inspiration

7:22 I've had that exact experience with other creative endeavors, namely with making music. It's something I desperately want to understand and learn to channel effectively. It feels like I get into that maybe once every couple of months and it's this beautiful, dreamy state I wish I could live in. If I try to force it it just doesn't come.

what a dope channel, happy to find it!

love both his games but never actually heard any of his talks. this is eye opening

Thanks for the upload. Much appreciated. :-)

You deserve so many more subscribers. Thanks for the quality content!

johnathan blow is perhaps the smartest person I have ever heard

the last 2 min are where all the value in this talk was, for me

just discovered your channel, this is good stuff!

interesting stuff on the psychology of programming, great video

My mentor.

10:03 I think that would be what's known as Stream Of Consciousness. Some artists, and also writers, like to do that. I love doing that in writing; I find it fun to just go with the flow. Though I often end up at a point where I blank out and stop.

Improvisational dancing? Such an interesting human being.

Haha Improvisational dancing!) Me too!(littl diffrnt prob tho lol) Love this guy

WOO thank you! :)

Jonathan Blow has fantastic skin.

great

5:34 This !

Thanks a lot! Could you also upload the full unedited version? Or share it in some other way?

As someone that's fairly visual, I always thought I didn't think like the "typical" programmer. I always had to visualize the program. He seems to touch upon it here. Not sure if others just never described it as visualization or if it's not as common is programming.

this thing 17:15 is so complicated people are spending 17:18 you know eight hours a day for their 17:21 life dealing with something ugly like 17:25 doesn't that matter I think it does I 17:29 think it mattered for me for sure

things change

13:18 We are using the same languages for math and music as 100 years ago. And I don't like either of them, so it puzzles me how there haven't been more attempts to create new ones. I think C will always be around as "one step above assembly", but higher level programming languages seem to be much harder for people to agree on.

He reads China Mieville ! cool :)

I used to get too tired to be productive and then think about it lightly while falling asleep. Then sometimes I would dream about it, remembering the dream, usually not. Then, when I got back to work (remembering dreams or not), it would just flow out of my fingertips to the keyboard, previous day's problems solved, how I did it, I have no idea, but it works. I can also dig into it and say aha, that is how I did it. Lately my dreams have usually been about attempted gaslighting, mostly by lawyers. This kills the productivity that they are after.

God this is so fucking accurate and based

10:00 I've had that experience many times when I have been painting. The problem is that I don't feel the result is my own work. I didn't rationally decide to make it that way as my brain was not engaged in a conscious way at any point during the experience of 'Flow' (see Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi for more on this). My video game designs are similarly organic products of a "flow state" of consciousness, and were I to analyse why I was choosing one feature over another in the design I think that I would become painfully introspective and self-conscious and unproductive as I would not be able to simultaneously feel my way forward into the unexplored dynamical space of possibilities (much as I feel my way forward into the unexplored aesthetic space of possibilities when I am painting), and critique my process without interfering with it being the free unfettered process it is. Self criticism actually helps me in my writing, with the interrogation of my arguments or the exploration of my characters being a very necessary constraint, "out of which grit the oyster can form some pearls". Programming is more like writing, and it can dictate the correct direction that a project should take, with 'bugs' (i.e. things that deviate from the desired game design specification) sometimes being more fun to play with than you would have envisaged, were it not for the fact you have a dynamical system that now reifies it, and you are free to play that version of the game rules. This can lead you to abandon your desired game design idea and pick this 'mistake' instead, as it wasn't that the program didn't run, but that it didn't conform to the specification, and when the program is its own _de facto_ specification of an alternative game design, and that design may be better than what you were thinking of doing, then it is trivially easy to keep that new design around as well as complete the original (without the bug), just to see if the original was better. You do not get to copy an oil painting half way through the process, to explore some side idea, and still have the original painting at the point at which you got distracted. This is probably for the best as an aesthetic space is one of progressively restrictive constraints of marks already made, or marks made that assert themselves over the marks they occlude and erase (yet which inspired them), and not something with a temporal component, like writing which can like programming conjure a dynamical theatrical space of possibilities involving multiple interacting characters in an environment which can operate according to (self-consistent) fantastical rules. I have never "tuned out" when programming, as Jonathan described here, but then I had my code crash and then needed to figure out why as I was being super self critical whilst writing the code and imagining all the ways it could potentially go catastrophically awry, so the only things I experience are "bugs" which don't crash the computer and just yield a different dynamical space of possibilities than I had sought (and which may be ultimately more desirable), so they are only "mismatches against my intentions" and it is possible that my intentions can change if I stumble upon a more interesting dynamical system with richer gameplay.

Nothing to see here, just JB talking about attaining ultra instinct for 20 minutes

Edmund McMillen would be a good interviewee!

Making a tool as simple and universal as possible is good, but sometimes the user expects a more complex interface than you come up with for the exact reason that they want the tools they use to be as simple and universal as possible, but not in the way of mathematical modeling, but maybe in terms of workflow and creative potential or some other thing. But the common theme is there.

Sometimes when learning, you have to throw the whole thing out and start over. Sometimes when you go to add in something you prepared earlier, you are better off just scrapping it and starting over. I start over a lot, but really its how you build the coder 'muscle-memory' - its how you develop your own problem solving style and workflow. I mean, you might take a while to learn something, say a robust player collision system. First time you code that it will probably be a mess, you'll have to add bits here and there and it'll end up like so much spaghetti. But then the next time, start over - and it's more compact, more complex but more capable and manageable. But then the next time, start over - and you'll be coding the system from start to finish with no compiles inbetween, just like JB here - coding muscle memory is a thing. And it's not just for a function or a snippet of code either - it depends on your own experience but hell, I've written entire particle systems - hundreds of lines of code. The more you code, the better you get - the more you start over, the better your code gets... but don't stop for 1 second, because your brain made writing that code more efficient and less time consuming so that you could spend the time learning more or improving other areas. Necessity is the catalyst to learning and a brain is a muscle - this is especially important for programmers to remember... I mean we can be arrogant, and often we can only ever teach ourselves something and that is quite difficult to understand. I think its funny when you hear... 'Coding your own games is easy' - like does anyone actually think that programming is easy? - that anyone can learn it? - that it's accessible to all people? - or is that just something people say to make programmers feel a bit more normal.... I mean maybe that's unnecessary - maybe it would be better to just be real and tell people that if they aren't already learning to program, they just won't. Know what I mean? - the phrase ''I want to learn...'' isn't in a programmers vocabulary - they're already learning and not bothering to tell you about it :D - anyone who says they want to learn something tends to be someone who already can learn something and choses other activities instead.

One thing a lot of programmers seem to do is say "right" when explaining something. I wonder why that is...

Joe Rogan needs to have him on his podcast damnit!

is this blow's house?

The everlasting mysterious "thing" 😁

I want you and Brando Sanderson to work together and experience ever

What are you in doubt, mr. On Doubt?

Some programming happens and you don't know why. It's discovery. Some days your brilliant some days you suck. Programming allows ideas to be tried.

Won't someone please save the spines on those poor books.

man i cant even memorise any oop pattern

but if you are not able to explain what that internalized thing is, what good is it ? Eg: great minds were able to explain why heat flows from hot to cool by not just saying it just happens that way naturally, but rather put it in concrete terms of entropy etc. Its absolutely useless when you just say you go into a trance and come up with a program in 20 min.

wanna see some of that dancing

"Sausage Making" book lol

my personal brand of andrew tate

The visuals were nice at first.. but by 5-6 minutes in I had to stop watching and just listen because I couldn't pay attention to what Jon was saying with all the random imagery and distracting facts flashing on screen. Food for thought. Edit: The imagery at the end regarding Braid and The Witness were fine because they were in context and weren't distracting. The random time lapses of his streams were totally out of place and unnecessary IMO.

Blow is articulate and has a deep wealth of knowledge. That said, I'd like to talk about his verbal tic where he often says "right?" This is a very common habit among smart tech guys when they are explaining things (at least in my experience as a software developer at several companies). I can understand why they do it. When you are usually the smartest guy in the room and have to explain complex thoughts to someone, it's reassuring to constantly make sure that your listener is still listening, keeping up, still on the same page. If you lose them at any point, then the rest of your explanation is worthless. However, personally, I find this habit extremely irritating. It makes it difficult for me to listen to people who talk this way. Most of the time that they say "right?" they say it after something that the listener would have literally no way of knowing whether it is right or not because it is a personal detail. Other times, the listener can't answer the "question" in any meaningful way because he is the one listening and is only learning about the ideas just now. It is telling that when people talk like this, they don't typically wait for the listener to actually answer the question, which implies that the question is not there to be answered. Instead, it's a way to fill space, to provide the speaker with a moment to pause and think about what to say next while maintaining the floor to speak. It's like a valley girl saying "like" after every other word. (Blow occasionally uses the "like" filler as well!) Some examples: "I'm going to the party tonight, and you are coming too, right?" - Appropriate, verifying information owned by the listener. "I'm going to the party tonight, right?" - How would I know, you're the one to decide that. "I reached my current programming skill in 2013, right?" - That's your own personal detail, I would have no way to know. "Therefore that's why C++ was developed, right?" - You're the one giving me new information, how can I possibly answer? "C++ is a clunky language, right?" - This is an opinion, it's awkward to weirdly force me to either immediately object or implicitly agree. "You're building a chair for people to sit in every day of their life, right?" - You're the one setting up an analogy, how can I possibly know what you are getting at yet? My impression is that people fall into this tic when they are a little unsure of how to explain something. I would strongly recommend that people identify this tic in their language and work to remove it as it serves no real purpose, it only serves to belittle and annoy.

7:08 His description of the programming activity is super weird. I don't program in this way. When I program I have a sort of mental image (kind of like a diagram?) and I have to translate it into code. Sometimes the image is so high level that I have to jot things down on paper (so I can see the bigger picture) and then translate from paper to code. But I'm INTP. I guess he is an INTJ?

"It's going to be an uncomfortable chair most of the time." Doesn't this all come back to code reuse? If a language is good at offering code reuse facilities, the chair will be fine. Most languages suck at offering code reuse, though, which is one of the main reasons why minimalistic design falls down.

I'll make a script/programing language designed specefically for me. to write code fast, efficent, and in simple language. the I'll fine tune a large language model that would use that script/Programing language. and me talking to it would look like aliens talking to each other but it would be something like "]function_build_shout_fire" change value inside it to 5 before pasting it. link ]... + ].. . an there is like this big script that the llm does. and it goes to everyone and changes it or manipulate it. this will make me write thousands and thousands of code in a short amount of time. the issue is opimizing the code. at the end of the day it's about optimizing it. and make it it effecent and last long.

This guy is hallucinating

do we NEED. ANOTHER. programming language.

"The Shape of a Problem Doesn't Start Anywhere": Please don't just quote the brain fart of a person who has made a few decent games as if it is the excretion of some ancient wise oracle. Apart from being awkward, vague and obtuse, if you read it in the context of what he was saying at 6:33 it is simply wrong. The entire point of breaking down a problem into smaller parts and then solving those individually is to provide us with an a clear starting point to solve each of those sub-problems. He actually seems to have mixed up his concept of the overall global problem we are trying to solve (ie create the game) and the multitude of local/specific problems required to accomplish the global. Jonathan does seem to have some useful things to say for fellow developers, but this worshipping of his so called genius by many people is just cringeworthy.

darn shame he thinks that women by biology are not as interested in tech as men lol.