5 ms·

I don't quite get why this is flagged, hence I vouched for it. Calling someone a "full time safety coomer" seems innapropriate for someone holding the title of

by j-pb 4y ago

I don't quite get why this is flagged, hence I vouched for it. Calling someone a "full time safety coomer" seems innapropriate for someone holding the title of "vp of community" in the Zig foundation. It certainly makes me reevaluate the zig community, which thus far was at times a bit childish, but always friendly. While I see this might violate "Eschew flamebait.", a constructive reflection of the interactions between the rust and zig community still feels like a worthwhile endeavour. Edit: After some research it seems that the author has since apologised https://twitter.com/croloris/status/1568704125826748416 https://twitter.com/croloris/status/1568704125826748416

rtev 4y ago
“I’m sorry” 10 hours late followed by an excuse, plus he doubled down hard after the first one. Hard not to be turned off of the Zig language after this kind of thing. Looks like he deleted the original tweet and is in full damage control mode
- DangitBobby 4y ago
  I don't understand how this could turn you off. Is it good? Is it useful? Use it. Who cares if some community rep guy is a perfect princess or a bit of an asshat.
  - j-pb 4y ago
    This sentiment ignores, that programming, like everything, is a social endeavour.
    - DangitBobby 4y ago
      You aren't really hanging out with the guy who wrote that tweet when you use zig. And it seems a bit hasty to extrapolate his behavior to be representative of the entire community, if you think that matters.
  - klyrs 4y ago
    Using a niche language often means interacting with its community. I don't mind if a couple of fans duke it out, but when somebody like Loris resorts to ad hominem attacks, that's pretty telling. Egos are getting in the way, they've lost sight of the goal and now it's just another content-free slapfest. It isn't a good look. If I report a bug in the language, is somebody important going to take it personally and flame me for it?
    - ptato 4y ago
      Nobody is going to take a bug report personally because it isn't the same as implying the project is pointless and even morally wrong whenever the opportunity arises.
      - klyrs 4y ago
        I've seen developers take bug reports personally quite a few times in my career, and the behavior Loris exhibited today is a very common precursor.
    - anonymoushn 4y ago
      I have found the Zig contributors to be quite reasonable when I have reported bugs and submitted patches.
      - klyrs 4y ago
        Me too! But, communities change, and this is one that I care about, because the language is frikkin awesome.
    - kristoff_it 4y ago
      For what it's worth, I only handle GH issues relative to the autodoc system. I can say with confidence that all Zig core contributors are nicer than me, although today this statement does sound less convincing than usual. I acted out, and I'm acknowledging the mistake. If you want to submit a bug report, make sure to follow the template and you will be treated well.
- sarlalian 4y ago
  First, I’m not a zig user, or a zig community member so I don’t really care that much whether you use it or not. But it comes off as a bit immature to let a single person’s actions turn you off from an entire language. I’m sure it would be easy to find some shitty behavior from some individual in almost every community. There are dozens of examples in linux, in ruby, in python, in rust, etc. Open source communities are not homogenous, and they involve humans. People have bad days, people say things that aren’t well thought out, some times it takes a while for someone to come around to why what they said was hurtful, counter productive, etc. I don’t know the country of origin for this person, but some cultures have a much more direct and confrontational style of communication. Use the language or don’t, but if this is the reason you don’t, maybe spend some time reflecting on why a relatively unimportant interaction appears to have affected you so strongly.
  - threatofrain 4y ago
    The reverse happens too. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/MINASWAN https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/MINASWAN Anyways, Loris Cro is not a random single person, he's more like the public face of the leadership team. For context, Loris is framing the greater conversation as punching back against Rust's dishonest marketing practices. Should this matter if you like to use the tool? Not for me. But I'm not going to be confused when people look at the PR smell and feel averted.
    - kristoff_it 4y ago
      That's a fair argument. I should be understandably held to higher standards than the average community member. I got into a heated discussion and fell into one of the common social media fallacies, ultimately acting in a distruptive way. As for the marketing debate, trying to manage expectations wrt to Zig is one of the main things that I do, and sometimes people do get too excited and imagine that the tool is able to do things that it ultimately cannot. Tampering that enthusiasm and trying to stay concrete is something that I try to do with great care. My impression is that when it comes to Rust, some of the arguments in extreme favor of rust (Rust protects you from everything) and also against Rust (Rust is useless because the compiler uses LLVM, which is C++) IMO both stem from mistakes in how the safety story is taught. That said, I'm saying this to provide context to my perspective, not as a justification to my outburst.
- kristoff_it 4y ago
  As I said in a few places, I do apologize for the outburst. Deleting the tweet is part of showing that I do mean to take back my words. As for the time delay, some of it is because it took me a bit to cool down, some of it is just that I wasn't checking on Twitter. One of my usual rants is that I keep Twitter notifications disabled and that the app keeps nagging me about it.
- naikrovek 4y ago
  > Hard not to be turned off of the Zig language after this kind of thing. can you explain that? I see this as one person (a person who is not the Zig language itself) having an opinion, being passionate about it, then realizing a mistake was made, and then learning from it and (very likely) becoming a better person for it? or are you really someone who thinks "Eric Clapton is super duper racist so it's hard not to be turned off of music entirely" I do what the person behind those tweets did very often, on this site, and every time I realize my mistake and become a better person because of what I learn.
  - rtev 4y ago
    The Zig language community is small. I think it’s more comparable to “Eric Clapton is a valued member of the local music scene, so I’d rather not engage with that scene”. Not that he’s actually comparable to Eric Clapton, but yknow.
philippejara 4y ago
What even is a "$language community"? Lately it seems like everything has some weird community aspect to it that becomes relevant because (?), single player games have communities now, even brands and, I guess now, programming languages(certainly enough to have a VP of community). Sure stuff like comp.lang.$language has been a thing for forever but that was not at that level. I probably went into a bit of a ramble but the point i'm getting at is that odds are this "community" is most likely not representative of the people that actually use the language and to not assume people who do are automatically part of it, not saying you were, but some words of caution I suppose. And furthermore, although that is unrelated to your point but more in a general statement for the younger people: You don't need to join a community or even talk to people to use a language or api or whatever, they're tools and using them or not should be based on where your technical interests lie or what you're trying to solve, not trying to be part of a social circle where the only thing you have in common is that you all wrote some lines of code in a certain script. Don't let yourself be defined by such things and don't do it to yourselves.
- enneff 4y ago
  Open source projects definitely have communities and it’s not an artificial thing. You have the developers and consumers of the project and they have a lot of social interactions.
  - philippejara 4y ago
    Neither are the other communities listed artificial(maybe the brands? not sure). Open source projects communities I'd relate more to the comp.lang.$language, and I guess the social interaction would be relevant, but are there really enough people contributing to a project to have a "vp of community"? this is what raised the red flag for me, well that and someone making up a "cute" name to refer to themselves as part of an in-group like languages were youtube channels("Rustaceans"). I guess the edit I made would clear up where I was with my previous comment.
- theshrike79 4y ago
  Must be a generational thing or something. I've used a ton of languages and I've never interacted with the "community" of said language. I might've been on an (unofficial?) IRC channel for the language, but that's about it. Never felt the need to belong in a community for a hecking programming language =)
ryukoposting 4y ago
Some degree of childish-ness is to be expected from a language that's young. I'll snicker at the "coomer" comment when I get home from the office, but it doesn't change the fact that I won't be using Zig at work anytime soon. Not for anything serious, at least. To be clear, the comment changes nothing about Zig's nonexistent viability in a professional space. As a career C programmer, I believe that Zig has always been every luddite's backhanded answer to Rust made manifest.
sieabahlpark 4y ago
dang 4y ago
Your second sentence answers your first. On HN, let's stick to the intellectually interesting topics and steer clear of the ones that are mostly just drama. This is particularly important here, because both of these languages are popular topics already. We don't have space for all of them—frontpage space is the scarcest resource on HN—so we need to be discriminating about which are the best ones.

by j-pb 4y ago

rtev 4y ago

“I’m sorry” 10 hours late followed by an excuse, plus he doubled down hard after the first one. Hard not to be turned off of the Zig language after this kind of thing. Looks like he deleted the original tweet and is in full damage control mode

DangitBobby 4y ago
I don't understand how this could turn you off. Is it good? Is it useful? Use it. Who cares if some community rep guy is a perfect princess or a bit of an asshat.
- j-pb 4y ago
  This sentiment ignores, that programming, like everything, is a social endeavour.
  - DangitBobby 4y ago
    You aren't really hanging out with the guy who wrote that tweet when you use zig. And it seems a bit hasty to extrapolate his behavior to be representative of the entire community, if you think that matters.
- klyrs 4y ago
  Using a niche language often means interacting with its community. I don't mind if a couple of fans duke it out, but when somebody like Loris resorts to ad hominem attacks, that's pretty telling. Egos are getting in the way, they've lost sight of the goal and now it's just another content-free slapfest. It isn't a good look. If I report a bug in the language, is somebody important going to take it personally and flame me for it?
  - ptato 4y ago
    Nobody is going to take a bug report personally because it isn't the same as implying the project is pointless and even morally wrong whenever the opportunity arises.
    - klyrs 4y ago
      I've seen developers take bug reports personally quite a few times in my career, and the behavior Loris exhibited today is a very common precursor.
  - anonymoushn 4y ago
    I have found the Zig contributors to be quite reasonable when I have reported bugs and submitted patches.
    - klyrs 4y ago
      Me too! But, communities change, and this is one that I care about, because the language is frikkin awesome.
  - kristoff_it 4y ago
    For what it's worth, I only handle GH issues relative to the autodoc system. I can say with confidence that all Zig core contributors are nicer than me, although today this statement does sound less convincing than usual. I acted out, and I'm acknowledging the mistake. If you want to submit a bug report, make sure to follow the template and you will be treated well.
sarlalian 4y ago
First, I’m not a zig user, or a zig community member so I don’t really care that much whether you use it or not. But it comes off as a bit immature to let a single person’s actions turn you off from an entire language. I’m sure it would be easy to find some shitty behavior from some individual in almost every community. There are dozens of examples in linux, in ruby, in python, in rust, etc. Open source communities are not homogenous, and they involve humans. People have bad days, people say things that aren’t well thought out, some times it takes a while for someone to come around to why what they said was hurtful, counter productive, etc. I don’t know the country of origin for this person, but some cultures have a much more direct and confrontational style of communication. Use the language or don’t, but if this is the reason you don’t, maybe spend some time reflecting on why a relatively unimportant interaction appears to have affected you so strongly.
- threatofrain 4y ago
  The reverse happens too. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/MINASWAN https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/MINASWAN Anyways, Loris Cro is not a random single person, he's more like the public face of the leadership team. For context, Loris is framing the greater conversation as punching back against Rust's dishonest marketing practices. Should this matter if you like to use the tool? Not for me. But I'm not going to be confused when people look at the PR smell and feel averted.
  - kristoff_it 4y ago
    That's a fair argument. I should be understandably held to higher standards than the average community member. I got into a heated discussion and fell into one of the common social media fallacies, ultimately acting in a distruptive way. As for the marketing debate, trying to manage expectations wrt to Zig is one of the main things that I do, and sometimes people do get too excited and imagine that the tool is able to do things that it ultimately cannot. Tampering that enthusiasm and trying to stay concrete is something that I try to do with great care. My impression is that when it comes to Rust, some of the arguments in extreme favor of rust (Rust protects you from everything) and also against Rust (Rust is useless because the compiler uses LLVM, which is C++) IMO both stem from mistakes in how the safety story is taught. That said, I'm saying this to provide context to my perspective, not as a justification to my outburst.
kristoff_it 4y ago
As I said in a few places, I do apologize for the outburst. Deleting the tweet is part of showing that I do mean to take back my words. As for the time delay, some of it is because it took me a bit to cool down, some of it is just that I wasn't checking on Twitter. One of my usual rants is that I keep Twitter notifications disabled and that the app keeps nagging me about it.
naikrovek 4y ago
> Hard not to be turned off of the Zig language after this kind of thing. can you explain that? I see this as one person (a person who is not the Zig language itself) having an opinion, being passionate about it, then realizing a mistake was made, and then learning from it and (very likely) becoming a better person for it? or are you really someone who thinks "Eric Clapton is super duper racist so it's hard not to be turned off of music entirely" I do what the person behind those tweets did very often, on this site, and every time I realize my mistake and become a better person because of what I learn.
- rtev 4y ago
  The Zig language community is small. I think it’s more comparable to “Eric Clapton is a valued member of the local music scene, so I’d rather not engage with that scene”. Not that he’s actually comparable to Eric Clapton, but yknow.

philippejara 4y ago

What even is a "$language community"? Lately it seems like everything has some weird community aspect to it that becomes relevant because (?), single player games have communities now, even brands and, I guess now, programming languages(certainly enough to have a VP of community). Sure stuff like comp.lang.$language has been a thing for forever but that was not at that level. I probably went into a bit of a ramble but the point i'm getting at is that odds are this "community" is most likely not representative of the people that actually use the language and to not assume people who do are automatically part of it, not saying you were, but some words of caution I suppose. And furthermore, although that is unrelated to your point but more in a general statement for the younger people: You don't need to join a community or even talk to people to use a language or api or whatever, they're tools and using them or not should be based on where your technical interests lie or what you're trying to solve, not trying to be part of a social circle where the only thing you have in common is that you all wrote some lines of code in a certain script. Don't let yourself be defined by such things and don't do it to yourselves.

enneff 4y ago
Open source projects definitely have communities and it’s not an artificial thing. You have the developers and consumers of the project and they have a lot of social interactions.
- philippejara 4y ago
  Neither are the other communities listed artificial(maybe the brands? not sure). Open source projects communities I'd relate more to the comp.lang.$language, and I guess the social interaction would be relevant, but are there really enough people contributing to a project to have a "vp of community"? this is what raised the red flag for me, well that and someone making up a "cute" name to refer to themselves as part of an in-group like languages were youtube channels("Rustaceans"). I guess the edit I made would clear up where I was with my previous comment.
theshrike79 4y ago
Must be a generational thing or something. I've used a ton of languages and I've never interacted with the "community" of said language. I might've been on an (unofficial?) IRC channel for the language, but that's about it. Never felt the need to belong in a community for a hecking programming language =)

ryukoposting 4y ago

Some degree of childish-ness is to be expected from a language that's young. I'll snicker at the "coomer" comment when I get home from the office, but it doesn't change the fact that I won't be using Zig at work anytime soon. Not for anything serious, at least. To be clear, the comment changes nothing about Zig's nonexistent viability in a professional space. As a career C programmer, I believe that Zig has always been every luddite's backhanded answer to Rust made manifest.

sieabahlpark 4y ago

dang 4y ago

Your second sentence answers your first. On HN, let's stick to the intellectually interesting topics and steer clear of the ones that are mostly just drama. This is particularly important here, because both of these languages are popular topics already. We don't have space for all of them—frontpage space is the scarcest resource on HN—so we need to be discriminating about which are the best ones.