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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
by 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 agoI 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 agoYes. 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 agopcwalton 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 agoTo 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.
- kristoff_it 4y agoI see the opposite as an equally big problem: bad messaging creates Rust haters who occasionally try to interact with the Zig community, lowering the quality of the community experience if not pushed away. That's another thing that I've been doing and thus fueling my annoyance towards bad messaging around safety.