# Jonathan Blow on Programming Language Design Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/software-unscripted-5320480/jonathan-blow-on-programming-language-design Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/software-unscripted-5320480/jonathan-blow-on-programming-language-design.md Podcast: [Software Unscripted](https://stenobird.com/podcast/software-unscripted-5320480) Published: 2025-11-15T21:28:14+00:00 Episode link: https://shows.acast.com/software-unscripted/episodes/jonathan-blow-on-programming-language-design Audio file: https://sphinx.acast.com/p/open/s/664fde3eda02bb0012bad909/e/6918f06ee42e3466f29467f9/media.mp3 Processing state: not_requested JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/software-unscripted-5320480/episodes/jonathan-blow-on-programming-language-design Duration seconds: 6102 ## Resource 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 Determinism in Programming 35:07 Balancing Power and Safety 40:11 Memory Safety vs. Performance 50:15 The Evolution of Software Performance 55:32 Performance Awareness 01:03:56 Dependencies and Version Control 01:14:54 Dependency Availability Risk 01:18:42 Memory Management 01:24:51 Sandboxing 01:30:23 Operating Systems Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. ## Actions - request_transcript: `POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/software-unscripted-5320480/episodes/jonathan-blow-on-programming-language-design/transcription-requests` — Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode. - read_markdown: `GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/software-unscripted-5320480/jonathan-blow-on-programming-language-design.md` — Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource. A page view does not enqueue transcription. Agents should invoke `request_transcript` explicitly when they need this episode processed. ## Transcript Full transcripts are not published on public pages unless there is a clear rights basis.