Jonathan Blow says C++ ‘is a weird mess,’ so he’s making his own alternative

Braid mastermind Jonathan Blow is cooking up his own programming language to give budding game developers an alternative to C++.

Speaking with GI.biz, Blow revealed that the self-made tool is known as Jai, and expects a closed beta to roll out by the end of the year. 

According to Blow, Jai stands at around 15% in terms of improved productivity, but reckons it could reach anywhere between 50-80% given enough time.

He outlined three main goals with Jai: To improve the quality of life for the programer; to simplify the systems; and finally, to boost expressive power by giving programmers the ability to develop a large amount of functionality with only a small amount of code.

As mentioned, all of this is meant to be an alternative to C++, which Blow describes as 'a weird mess.'

'People think a programming language should be a complicated ecosystem,' Blow said at Gamelab. 'I don't want to learn an ecosystem for a year, I just want to put 3D graphics on there.'

Blow is currently working on an 'intermediate step' for his new game, but has big ambitions for Jai; eventually, he hopes it'll be powerful enough to program AAA titles.