Jonathan Blow on Programming Language Design

Jonathan Blow on Programming Language Design

From Software Unscripted by Richard Feldman

November 15, 2025 · 1h 42m

About this episode

Jonathan Blow discusses programming language design and its implications for game development with Richard Feldman.

Jonathan Blow, creator of popular games Braid and The Witness, talks with Richard about programming language design - including the design of the programming language he's been building for game developers. Keynote & Tech Demo - https://youtu.be/IdpD5QIVOKQ ECS and Rust's Borrow Checker - https://youtu.be/4t1K66dMhWk "The 30 Million Line Problem" - https://youtu.be/kZRE7HIO3vk "A New Programming Language for Games" - https://youtu.be/TH9VCN6UkyQ?si=Z5cqazo4QU7AibzB Roc Programming Language - https://roc-lang.org Casey Muratori's "Performance-Aware Programming" Course - https://www.computerenhance.com/p/welcome-to-the-performance-aware File Pilot File Explorer - https://filepilot.tech/ Ghostty Terminal - https://ghostty.org/ Language Server Protocol - https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/ WebAssembly Integer Sizes - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/WebAssembly/Reference/Numeric/Const Cliff Click's Sea of Nodes Compiler IR - https://github.com/SeaOfNodes/ Chapters 00:00 The Programming Establishment 02:04 Metaprogramming 05:04 Compile-Time Execution 08:05 Language Feature Interoperability 10:53 Compile Time Execution 27:52 Cross-Compiling and FFI 31:04…

People in this episode

Host: Richard Feldman

Guest: Jonathan Blow

Topics covered

  • programming language design
  • game development
  • metaprogramming
  • memory safety
  • performance awareness
  • dependencies

Keywords

  • programming languages
  • game development
  • Braid
  • The Witness
  • memory management
  • performance
  • metaprogramming
  • dependencies

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Roc Programming Language, Casey Muratori, File Pilot, Ghostty, Language Server Protocol, WebAssembly, Cliff Click

Products: Braid, The Witness

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