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Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

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Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#471

Post by daedrdev »

jonplackett wrote: post #9

The thing is - is it a self fulfilling prophecy? We already know junior hiring an are down. And how many people are now excited to learn to code compared to 5years ago? How many of those excited people are ACTUALLY learning to code and not just learning to prompt? LLMs/agents will take over (or at least dominate) software dev even if they don’t get any better because humans will just get old and there’ll be no new hu…

This is quite true. Also, there is no project you can make as a junior to demonstrate your unassisted competence because 10 other people used AI for a similar project

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#472

Post by ivanjermakov »

chuckadams wrote: post #461
RetroTechie wrote: post #97

There's so much good stuff in this post. Can't help to think of a recent HN post about most AI-generated projects being abandoned within months. Why? Because value of a project is not in the code produced. It's in the amount of battle-testing that code has seen. Battle-tested, mature code > fresh rewrite. Existing Zig codebase has seen X amount of battle-testing. Rust rewrite: 0 (except -I'm assuming- passing test su…

> To me it reads like Bun was forked. Will the Zig version survive? Will the Rust one? Both? All options ok. Maintenance of the zig code was abandoned, while the port continued in the same repo, and it's unlikely any work on the zig branch will keep momentum. So yes it forked, but more in the fork+exec sense (or maybe just exec, the analogy's not that great).

According to Andrew, bun-zig is not something some brave soul would be eager to maintain.

> We became increasingly horrified at the programming practices we saw in Bun's codebase. Hacks on top of hacks. Abuse of assertions. Most of all, recklessly speeding past feature after feature with very little time taken for reflection and elimination of bugs and technical debt.

Just "1MLOC JavaScriptCore wrapper" is enough to figure out why.

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#473

Post by sire-vc »

The more I interact with the real world and mature as a person the less respect I have for temper tantrums such as these. Even if everything you say is correct, coming across as emotional and petty just does not help your case. This just makes Zig look like a zealot fighting a turf war rather than a serious ecosystem.

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#474

Post by kalcode »

Lerc wrote: post #430
woodruffw wrote: post #28

I 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…

>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, might subject me to this kind of article from their BDFL. I think it is worse than that, the comments from people in threads about this suggest that this is an attitude that is creeping into the community. They may not be a majority, but if kinder souls decide to leave for a mor…

There seems to be a team sport mentality with AI topic in HN these days. Almost feels like people are picking sides, and thus not being very thoughtful or rational.

Sigh, there definitely an attitude creeping into the community and it's a huge turn off unfortunately.

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#475

Post by wolttam »

Andrew may be a little bit grating to some (including me at times), but I value the perspectives that he brings.

There is a lot of discussion about the exact tone and phrasing, etc, of Andrew's post. There's something there - we expect perfectly composed writing, never getting emotional, never saying how we actually feel about a specific individual's behaviour. Meanwhile, in private, we often let those emotions fly, name names, etc.

I think Andrew gave us an actual look into how he feels about Jarred -- ambivalent, largely.

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#476

Post by adamddev1 »

skydhash wrote: post #443
adamddev1 wrote: post #300

In this whole discussion of what can be done with AI, I think a lot of people are missing the distinction between: A. making consumer end-user apps, basic enterprise applications (making end products) B. making tooling, libraries, languages (making things people build on top of) What is the "software engineering" that AI will replace? A? Or both A and B? Just because people can get away with using AI to make A apps t…

> Just because people can get away with using AI to make A apps that are "good enough" or pass test suites That requires some proof, because the trend is that users of A apps dislike the lack of engineering that comes with AI involvement.

Yes, I agree. I'm just trying to be charitable for the sake of the argument. I think it's better to make nothing with AI.

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#477

Post by araoz »

neutronicus wrote: post #255
petcat wrote: post #133

Earlier 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…

Yeah, I mean … as a C++ dev I have those same existential “what’s the point” questions about Zig.

AFAIK zig is not trying to be "better C++" (that is Rust), zig is more like "better C". a ergonomic low level lang with very little abstractions. zig explicitly doesn't want to be better C++ or rust

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#478

Post by lunar_mycroft »

selfmodruntime wrote: post #441
lunar_mycroft wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that writing safe rust often requires designing the architecture around rust's ownership model, meaning a file by file, line by line translation doesn't necessarily leave you much closer to safe rust than you were at the start.

This is untrue. You can do a file by file translation by using clone and copy liberally. After you're done, you can incrementally introduce borrowing.

You can also do one by using `unsafe` liberally, especially if you're flexible about actually upholding rust's rules (as the bun team just did). But either way, you're still stuck with a code base that's going to need extensive refactoring if you want to actually take advantage of rust.

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#479

Post by Arainach »

woodruffw wrote: post #447
Arainach wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to claim that they're better, but making a big fuss about them in Zig - to the point of maintaining a compiler fork - and then not talking about it at all in the Rust doc (where it's apparent to anyone who's used Rust that compilation there is guaranteed to be slower) is dishonest or at least massively hypocritical.

Where are they making a big fuss?

I knew that LLMs had caused reading comprehension to tank, but I quite literally already directly answered that question - as did the original article under discussion here.

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#480

Post by mech998877 »

TeriyakiBomb wrote: post #244
sph wrote: post #128

Earlier 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…

A drum I've been banging increasingly often recently is that having friction and time to work ideas over in your mind adds huge amounts of value. Vibe coded projects have this very specific, well, vibe to them where you can clearly see that the lack of time to digest has allowed the person to not challenge their own worst impulses. You can see it in the feature bloat, the lack of depth and polish in core features and…

I disagree with this, and I've been spending time thinking about it because some of my friends had a similar conversation.

The friction itself does not add value. The time spent thinking on the problem does. Friction should be minimized beyond the absolute bare minimum. Programming is a discipline where your workstation is already streamlined, and it is easy to forget where the friction is. Programming is done in a world of pure though, in a sense, so most of the friction already lives in your head, and it is difficult to distinguish effort wasted fighting friction from effort making real progress.

Consider the Wright brothers. They worked iteratively. When they wanted to design an airplane they moved from Ohio to a windy place with lots of loose sand (NC outer banks). Why? So that they could do test runs with good wind conditions (for an airplane that is barely able to fly this matters a lot) and crash with the least amount of damage. They rebuilt the airplane dozens and dozens of times and had a workshop tuned to their needs on location. They reduced friction wherever they could so that they got the most work done that they could with the least amount of distraction.

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