alt Hacker NewsJB's original claim, at least as I understood it, was that with LLVM and the like language tooling is now good enough that anybody can quickly whip up a language to their personal tastes with no PL background, and therefore the hurdle of novelty and generality required for a language to justify its existence is drastically lower than it has been in times past. It's a shame, but having his personal language be in closed beta twelve years later is pretty strong evidence against that thesis in a couple of different ways.
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It's evidence of no such thing. It categorically does not take 12 years to write a language from scratch, or anything remotely close to that, so the only thing that Blow taking 12 years to write a language is evidence of is that Blow chose not to prioritise language development very highly over doing anything else with his time for 12 years. Javascript was famously developed by one person in 10 days. Writing a language and compiler is a common semester project for students, ie. people who have no idea what they're doing.
Blow's claim was that C++ sucks and that an alternative better suited for gamedev should be created. It's not like he's had good things to say about LLVM.
Eh? It is not his duty to public his language. It is not like publish the language is the end of story, you need to deal with the flood of feedback, that not always from good wills. The drama could cause him to lost time, effort and motivation, and hinder his game dev process.
It is pretty understandable he needs to hold back before he releases his new game, or even more.
AFAIK, the language is and was used in JB's projects. JB is just very picky about when he wants people to see things. He doesn't want outside voices influencing him and he still has some things he wants to think through. Doing that mostly solo takes time - it's not like the PL is the only thing he has been doing
If you are fine with getting there 80% his claim is correct. That he's using the language for his games proves it to me. Of course, if you require it to be both open and popular to be a success you kind of reach a stalemate. In a world where everyone can quickly whip up a language I would expect most to be closed to the public anyway.
I would like you to elaborate on how still being in closed beta is an argument against the thesis. To me it just looks like avoiding feature-requests, nitpicks and community interactions for a product he doesn't even want to sell.