Andrew Kelley's thoughts on Jared Sumner is insanely savage.
Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
261–270 of 862 posts
Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or rather because they are always just of poor quality
If you had a time machine and you could republish a claude generated article about some interesting tech topic to 2010 I'm sure it would get ok engagement. To me the issue is that everything becomes written in the same style pattern. I don't know why but if I spot it I wince internally and immediately skim the post or just outright stop reading. A large part of it is overexposure. For me it's made browsing the intern…
> ok engagement
That is such a miserably low bar
Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
They get abandoned because they get generated on a whim. Sunk cost fallacy can be a feature: if you have spent a lot of blood, sweat, and tears on a project, you are more likely to push it through adversity and the doldrums that inevitably one will encounter. If all it took was one of those momentarily brilliant ideas and a prompt on Claude to produce something, there is no attachment whatsoever to it. Speaking as th…
It’s the same reason why everyone doesn’t wanna read LLM generated blog posts. The agreement used to be generally that you would spend more time writing than I would have to spend reading and when the agreement changes the quality changes as well.
Yeah -- if it wasn't worth your time to write the post, why do I think it should be worth my time to read it?
Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
#264Yeah, but argumenting that "Bun codebase is a mess" is anti-Zig in itself. The whole point of the borrow checker is to make it impossible to write wrong code. If Zig accepts bad code, but assumes people will have self-discipline to maintain it, how is that different from C? C assumes good discipline, as well as C++. But it will happily accept bad code. So I'm not even sure what Zig is even improving on. Rust was desi…
Static memory safety is a spectrum and so is code quality.
> how is that different from C?
Zig gives you far more memory and type safety than C and without a borrow checker and a complex generics system.
Zig also allows optional runtime checks (at the cost of runtime performance).
There is no better language between Rust and Zig because they have different tradeoffs that are better or worse in different scenarios. It is more like Rust vs C++ and Zig vs C.
Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep. If anything, this ought to bias me against Anthropic. But I don’t share my employer’s opinions about everything, as I assume you don’t. (Edit: I don’t understand the relevant of these links, to be clear. PyPI is a PSF-hosted project, but that’s because PSF is a legal and fiscal umbrella, not because they pay me for my contributions to PyPI. They don’t.)
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Someone pays your living, I’m guessing. But I trust that you aren’t unduly motivated by their interests, because you’re a human with your own thoughts and opinions. I ask you kindly to grant me the same presumption.
Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
#266programming language creators have now fully pivoted from 'my language is faster than yours' to 'my corporate criticism is sharper than yours' and honestly it's an upgrade
Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Now if that's further migrated to safe Rust, put into production & gathered feedback from lots of users, yes then you have something. Obviously they have to start somewhere if they want to get to safe rust with a considerable degree of battle testing. So they decided to start with just a transliteration and go from there. I think the Zig people are really just concerned that maybe Zig itself is a DOA language becau…
I used to think there's a good niche for "better C" - and that Zig was the one language angling for that. A language that can be used in the same contexts as C, to do the same things as C code, in very much the same way, but with some modern features, some stronger guarantees and some helpful syntactic sugar? A welcome thing for embedded development. On the other end, Rust to me felt like "better C++" - outside the e…
You write Better C and the first thing I think about is D-lang.
Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
I could point to the same examples this article refers to: the Bun blog post says "Having a rigid style guide [in Zig] with clear ownership expectations explicitly spelled out in the type system was a real option for Bun" and presents no technical reason why they didn't choose (or even TRY) that. They handwave it with "This is and ergonomic than the Zig we expect". Why was it in their own words a real option? And why…
Every blog post has infinite things it does not mention. "Technical substance" simply requires that some technically substantive things are mentioned. Which was indeed the case.
Not about the things that matter.
If you write a blog post about "I switched from X to Y", I expect the WHY: the pros and cons of X, of Y, and of the alternatives that were considered and dismissed before considering Y.
This is more a blog post about how to use Fable to switch from X to Y, than it is about X or Y.
Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
I kind of disagree that asking for world changing results is setting the bar too high, people’s claims about their personal experience are that the world changing results are already here, productivity has been multiplied and costs have been reduced by some factor, and AFAICT everyone is using these tools, with many reporting a similar experience. The fact that people’s personal experience using the tool don’t cohere…
The key word is "already". I myself absolutely expect world changing results. But that will need time. I can only say what I know. My own experiments in building nocodo, a coding agent are 12-13 years old. Pre-LLM. I used template based code generation and related ideas. Template processors and what not. nocodo.com is with me since 2013 maybe, you can verify. I am a software engineer, most of my experiments are on Gi…
Interesting! I am curious to ask someone who has been working on no-code tools for so long: I've been reading about no code platforms from the 1990s, and how all of those ended up failing. The reason I've seen cited most is that the tools/platforms did not allow for enough variability to do the jobs that people wanted (without becoming a full programming language themselves). What do you think about that in the context of the past ten years, pre- and post-LLMs?
And what do you think about coding agents in the next few years? Will we see a variation in agent capabilities? E.g. a company makes and distributes a specialized coding agent for CSS, or even serving up a kind of library that's language-agnostic, since they seem to be best at translation rather than creation?
Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
#270There's so much weaselling in this post. His suggested solution to Zig memory errors is to never dynamically allocate memory? I mean... come on.
He complains about the lack of motivational blog post until after the merge, but a) they aren't obliged to do that (where are all the "it's free so you can't complain" people now?), and b) they gave plenty of motivation in HN comments, the rewrite PR, etc.
I don't like the idea of AI slop code either but it seems to work at least reasonably well for porting from one language to another.