I'm trying to not let this affect my thoughts about Zig as a language but it's hard.
Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
61–70 of 862 posts
Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
#62I stand with Andrew. As someone who's been following Sumner's work closely for years, Kelley's accusations are very much true even if unkind. While the results are useful and cool, it a wankfluencer op from start to finish. I dare you to refute thus. And I say all this as someone who does agentic development 8hrs a day and someone who always pestered my team to opt for Rust and Deno instead of Node. Call a spade a sp…
Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
#63Did we read the same Anthropic and Andrew Kelly's posts? Anthropic is not in the programming language market; their post about rewriting Bun in Rust is full of technical details that led to improving the end product for their users. Zig's response is a sour opinion piece full of personal attacks. For context, I'm using Codex and have no interest in either Zig or Rust, so just observing this drama from the sidelines.
Yeah I don't understand these myopic takes. Jarred's post about Bun-Zig-Rust post was technical and polite. Andrew's post in response was anything but that.
If everyone sees the post as "polite", most of it probably been written by LLMs, as they remove anything that could be seen as "nonpolite" and human. Meanwhile, engineers who just want to publish their own thoughts and feelings on a subject, will be filled with stuff the public sees as "nonpolite", and since those hard edges weren't trimmed before the publishing, we can then assume this is actually a genuine person's thoughts and feelings.
Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
#64I think like most people, I don’t have a problem with Andrew “calling a spade a spade,” even if I find his reasoning motivated. The bigger problem with the post is that it talks out of both ends of the mouth: it’s clearly meant as a personal attack, but also insists that it isn’t. When I read the post, my first thought was that I wouldn’t want to build things in Zig, because any technical decision I make, good or bad…
[flagged]
> We wouldn't have gotten this far if not for Zig, and I'll always be grateful. Until very recently, programming language choice was a one-way decision for a project like Bun.
Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
#65Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
#66Languages do matter. And I think the only sensible backend languages when starting a new for-profit project is Python, Go, and Rust for 99% use-cases. In other cases, third-party packages, tooling, integrations, and telemetry starts to suffer.
Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
#67Did we read the same Anthropic and Andrew Kelly's posts? Anthropic is not in the programming language market; their post about rewriting Bun in Rust is full of technical details that led to improving the end product for their users. Zig's response is a sour opinion piece full of personal attacks. For context, I'm using Codex and have no interest in either Zig or Rust, so just observing this drama from the sidelines.
Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
#68I think like most people, I don’t have a problem with Andrew “calling a spade a spade,” even if I find his reasoning motivated. The bigger problem with the post is that it talks out of both ends of the mouth: it’s clearly meant as a personal attack, but also insists that it isn’t. When I read the post, my first thought was that I wouldn’t want to build things in Zig, because any technical decision I make, good or bad…
[flagged]
I read both posts, and didn’t leave the Bun one with a negative opinion of Zig. But I did leave the response post with that opinion.
Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m puzzled by how many people seem to be convinced (deluded?) into believing that their productivity has been multiplied and costs have become fractional to build things, why don’t I see any of that productivity gain or cost reduction out in the world? What has become cheaper or better engineered? If you believe posts like thsi, we should be living in a golden age of prosperity, when it seems that aside from getting…
A lot of those products are from big companies who seem to be struggling the most. Software does not solve bureaucracy. As an indie engineer, I have absolutely no doubt what I am doing myself. But that change does not mean my products will become popular. That is a lot beyond software. Also, the tooling is just barely 1.5 years old and people are already asking for world-changing results. All the while totally ignori…
The fact that people’s personal experience using the tool don’t cohere with the impact the tool has had in the world to me doesn’t suggest a slippage between how long it takes for productivity multipliers to be felt, it suggests that these tools might actually be better at delivering the perception to the user (and where relevant, the user’s manager) of increased productivity while real productivity gains are lower, or maybe zero, or maybe negative in some cases.