3 ms·

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 si

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.
  - anonymoushn 4y ago
    I think this interaction looked particularly bad because the person you replied to was pointing out a true detail, in the common style of nerds pointing out details, and readers will generally not have context about your previous interactions with them.
    - hyperpape 4y ago
      Yes. It's don't think it's fair to called "a heated discussion". pcwalton made a small correction about a claim someone made concerning the database, and croloris/kristoff_it made a response he subsequently regretted and deleted. There was no heat until he introduced it.
      - hitekker 4y ago
        pcwalton said on 9/9/2022 that Zig was "a massive step backwards for the industry". He believes that all new languages should be "memory safe"; anything that doesn't meet his definition of memory safe is against "consensus". https://twitter.com/pcwalton/status/1568302065851707392 https://twitter.com/pcwalton/status/1568302065851707392 Patrik's comment came before croloris's flame, and around the same time Zig was praised in the recent GameJam thread. The trade-off between memory safety and performance triggered a minor flamewar which Patrick heated by asserting that Zig wasn't memory safe and it violated "consensus". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32783244 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32783244
        dagmx 4y ago
        To slightly correct you, as I think you’re misreading the tweets, he said the change in the consensus of wanting memory safety to not caring about it was a massive step back for the industry. He was asking if the idea of memory safety was consensus and didn’t say that things against it were not consensus.
  - klyrs 4y ago
    > 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. I see this, and I agree that rust evangelists often go way too far and motte & bailey in arguments about safety. These arguments are safe to ignore. More importantly, if you engage with that class of argument; there's no winning. You certainly won't convince them of a thing, but you risk looking the fool. Keep your head up and talk about the many merits of Zig.

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.
- anonymoushn 4y ago
  I think this interaction looked particularly bad because the person you replied to was pointing out a true detail, in the common style of nerds pointing out details, and readers will generally not have context about your previous interactions with them.
  - hyperpape 4y ago
    Yes. It's don't think it's fair to called "a heated discussion". pcwalton made a small correction about a claim someone made concerning the database, and croloris/kristoff_it made a response he subsequently regretted and deleted. There was no heat until he introduced it.
    - hitekker 4y ago
      pcwalton said on 9/9/2022 that Zig was "a massive step backwards for the industry". He believes that all new languages should be "memory safe"; anything that doesn't meet his definition of memory safe is against "consensus". https://twitter.com/pcwalton/status/1568302065851707392 https://twitter.com/pcwalton/status/1568302065851707392 Patrik's comment came before croloris's flame, and around the same time Zig was praised in the recent GameJam thread. The trade-off between memory safety and performance triggered a minor flamewar which Patrick heated by asserting that Zig wasn't memory safe and it violated "consensus". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32783244 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32783244
      - dagmx 4y ago
        To slightly correct you, as I think you’re misreading the tweets, he said the change in the consensus of wanting memory safety to not caring about it was a massive step back for the industry. He was asking if the idea of memory safety was consensus and didn’t say that things against it were not consensus.
- klyrs 4y ago
  > 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. I see this, and I agree that rust evangelists often go way too far and motte & bailey in arguments about safety. These arguments are safe to ignore. More importantly, if you engage with that class of argument; there's no winning. You certainly won't convince them of a thing, but you risk looking the fool. Keep your head up and talk about the many merits of Zig.