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Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

raymyers.org

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

#571

Post by buredoranna »

> we still need good judgement and communcation in deciding where to go

I want to emphatically endorse this statement.

This is where the human workload will shift to: making good decisions... understanding why one path is preferred over another. And collaborating and communicating in constructive ways. More to the point, humans excel at being able to recognize when a chosen path is no longer fruitful, or where a conversation devolves into the unproductive.

We are constantly making decisions based on tradeoffs. We choose one approach over another, not so much because our chosen path is obviously superior, but because the peril on our chosen path is preferential to the peril on a different path.

I have used ai to great utility in my design process, to help me understand the tradeoffs within any given endeavor, greatly helping in choosing which path to take.

Thus far, I haven't seen an AI which can unilaterally be relied up on to always effect "good judgement" for the work it is tasked with completing.

But once good judgement, and the correct path, is codified in markdown files, ai can be exceedingly efficient in carrying it out.

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

#572

Post by whizzter »

Shorel wrote: post #445
whizzter wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the old craftsmen vs industry issue, Andrew comes from the craftsman tradition that prefers all other people developing to also be proud craftsmen. What Java, JS, Python and C# all did to conquer the industry from a C++ dominance was to provide safety harnesses for less "perfectionist" workers to fumble around without causing a mess, to write C and C++ in an increasingly hostile world we realized you needed a lo…

Where is D-lang in your car analogy? Would it be a Ferrari? :)

Can't remember the exact featureset of the popular D one (because boy, was there many languages called D and E and so on over the years in the 80s/90s), I'd say to be a car it needs both temporal and bounds safety at the least but faintly I remember D being a bit of a kitchen sink? Wasn't there 2 standard libraries for a while? Were they even coherent in style/used language features?

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

#573

Post by crowdhailer »

sph wrote: post #128
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…

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…

Not heard sunk cost fallacy described as a feature before. Interesting idea.

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

#575

Post by [deleted] »

Aurornis wrote: post #391
jraph wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't intend to write misleading stuff that makes Zig look bad when you leave and if you avoid ghosting the Zig foundation in scheduled meetings you had with them, I suppose you should be good.

> If you don't intend to write misleading stuff that makes Zig look bad What misleading stuff? Makes Zig look bad how? The posts I read were appreciative to Zig. The only “misleading” piece of either blog post that I recall was the Andrew Kelley claim that Bun wasn’t fuzzing, which was easily refuted by pointing to their fuzzing work. If there’s something more then I’d like to see it, but every time I ask nobody can…

[deleted]

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

#576

Post by tayo42 »

selfmodruntime wrote: post #439
p-e-w wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the Zig people are really just concerned that maybe Zig itself is a DOA language because it doesn't offer enough over C for any serious use and their flagship project has now abandoned it. You hit the nail on the head there. Zig is 10 years old now and it’s pretty clear that the industry isn’t biting, compared to the behemoth that is Rust. Between Rust, C, and C++ there is very little room for another langu…

The industry isn't biting @ Zig because it's unstable, notoriously difficult to integrate new changes into an existing codebase and because the compiler is a bitch to develop with (hard error on unused variables with no way to turn it off).

Go has that same problem/feature

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

#577

Post by crowdhailer »

mech998877 wrote: post #480
TeriyakiBomb wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

I think that friction of feedback and friction of construction are two different things. Having lots of tokens to build things doesn't mean you have more feedback. I'm a bun user I like it. I can't really comment from my use on what the Zig vs Rust rewrite means to me.

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

#578

Post by daitangio »

Sometimes I suspect the rust-rewrite is just a way to advertise Claude Code power.

In all my professional carrier so far, a full rewrite without reason is a recipe for disaster, see

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

This Joel Sposky article is always my northstar when I have such "temptations". My 2 cents

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

#580

Post by JetSetIlly »

busterarm wrote: post #221
simjnd wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Zig community is triggered, I think only Zig's creator is triggered because he is afraid of people interpreting this as "Zig is unsuitable for X". I think a lot of people will, but those who do probably weren't the target audience for Zig in the first place?

Context matters. Big announcements and uninformed blog posts can kill your momentum. I still remember the Twitter dev blog where they abandoned Ruby/Rails and the damage that did. It turned out Twitter was doing a lot of stupid things and there was a mismatch of tools and their goals. They loudly blamed the tools and people ate it up because Twitter was big, visible and adored at the time. Their conclusions bypassed…

Similar to Discord's migration from Go to Rust. The measurements and reasons they gave were true but even by the time of the migration, Go had already moved on and improved. They were using an old version of Go.

Rust might be the right choice for Discord, I've no idea about that, but the problem is that the blog post lives on and influences people to this day.

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