That's kind of a rediculous assessment. "How many games have you shipped in the last 10 years" is the standard for how good your advice is.

John has made two games + one soon in the last 17 years. Braid started off the indie boom, and the witness was a blockbuster hit. Casey works on game engines and optimization, and has an entire video series about writing a game from scratch.

I agree that some authors don't ship any actual software and engineers should stray away from their advice, but this is not that case.

I give Blow a little benefit of the doubt just because spending all of your money on your small business and seriously facing the risk of failure is pretty stressful. I'd be a lot meaner than he is if I were in his situation.

I think I'll judge that by looking at how convincing their arguments are (some are not, I think), not by raw output. After all they already output a lot.

I don't much about casey, but jblow seems to have gotten popular partly because of the timing with live streaming becoming mainstream and also because people find his brash "tell-it-like-it-is" opinions refreshing. It's the same reason why people tend to gravitate towards guys like linus or stallman. Having opinions and not being a fence-sitter makes you interesting.

If there's anyone who I think deserves to be able to say "all existing languages/engines suck" it's someone who made his own language from scratch to make an engine with it from scratch to make a game with it from scratch to combat the problem.

> Guess how many Blow has shipped? 0 so far, but it sounds close now.

One, but it was something like three years late:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/499180/Braid_Anniversary_...

The clean code guy hasn't shipped any game either.

I think you'll find that most development -teams- ship about one game every decade. It's hard to find examples of that not being the case.

These guys are more like artists than engineers, right? I don't care if my favorite band only releases one album a decade, if it's good.

> Since then, guess how many games Muratori has shipped? 0. (He cancelled his announced game.)

On one hand I'm sympathetic to this view point, on the other, he's done thousands of hours of YouTube videos and inspired a ton of programmers.

> Guess how many Blow has shipped? 0 so far, but it sounds close now.

Not going to lie, it's probably difficult being financially secure and still hustling like you're broke. I imagine it's more by choice (to do other things) than being unable to ship.

Why are they being criticized from the arbitrary metric of the last 10 years, when both had careers far longer than that? Jon's advice for software is the same advice he used when developing Braid and the Witness, which are both great games and for their time, technological feats, especially from an indie.

Jon's production from the last 10 year isn't even due to bad software methodology from what I observe, it's mainly seems to be because his company is creating a new programming language tailored to games. This doesn't seem to be done to make money, but rather, to try and fundamentally fixed issues that he perceives in game development. It's a lofty goal, and the compiler itself uses the same software methodolgy that he argues for, and it's quite good.

So I don't think this critism is fair. We should look at the arguments they present, and their multi-decade long careers as a measure of thir authority on this subject.

I think Blow and Muratori are pure engineers (as defined here: https://www.seangoedecke.com/pure-and-impure-engineering/).

Pure engineers deliver perfect and fast software somewhere along the Black Hole Era. Not quite heat death of the universe, but almost there.

Impure engineers deliver "working" code in a deadline, for an arbitrary definition of working. Basically, The Worse is Better™.

And your point is? Shipping garbage is better than not shipping anything?

The problem with people like you is you’re all about the money, all about the end product, never about the craft.

>> claiming they were all garbage

its not a claim if you prove it. Tt becomes a fact.

Blow proved his point by making a full blown programming language where he fixed things he complained about like compilation speed etc.

And then made a whole game in his own language.