The gratuit accusations in this thread should be flagged.
Open-source Zig book
211–220 of 426 posts
Re: Open-source Zig book
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
Humans get things wrong too. Quality prose usually only becomes that after many reviews.
If AI is used by “fire and forget”, sure - there’s a good chance of slop. But if you carefully review and iterate the contributions of your writers - human or otherwise - you get a quality outcome.
Absolutely.
But why would you trust the author to have done that when they are lying in a very obvious way about not using AI?
Using AI is fine, it's a tool, it's not bad per se. But claiming very loud you didn't use that tool when it's obvious you did is very off-putting.
Re: Open-source Zig book
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
AI gets things wrong ("hallucinates") much more often than actual subject matter experts. This is disingenuous.
Presumably the "subject matter expert" will review the output of the LLM, just like a reviewer. I think it's disingenuous to assume that just because someone used AI they didn't look at or reviewed the output.
A serious one yes.
But why would a serious person claim that they wrote this without AI when it's obvious they used it?!
Using any tool is fine, but someone bragging about not having used a tool they actually used should make you suspicious about the amount of care that went to their work.
Re: Open-source Zig book
#214> Learning Zig is not just about adding a language to your resume. It is about fundamentally changing how you think about software. I'm not sure what they expect, but to me Zig looks very much like C with a modern standard lib and slightly different syntax. This isn't groundbreaking, not a thought paradigm which should be that novel to most system engineers like for example OCaml could be. Stuff like this alienates p…
There is nothing new under the Sun. However, some languages manifest as good rewrites of older languages. Rust is that for C++. Zig is that for C. Rust is the small, beautiful language hiding inside of Modern C++. Ownership isn't new. It's the core tenet of RAII. Rust just pulls it out of the backwards-compatible kitchen sink and builds it into the type system. Rust is worth learning just so that you can fully experi…
>Rust is that for C++
No it's not. Rust has roots in functional languages. It is completely orthoganol to C++.
Re: Open-source Zig book
#215> Learning Zig is not just about adding a language to your resume. It is about fundamentally changing how you think about software. I'm not sure what they expect, but to me Zig looks very much like C with a modern standard lib and slightly different syntax. This isn't groundbreaking, not a thought paradigm which should be that novel to most system engineers like for example OCaml could be. Stuff like this alienates p…
Much of the book's copy appears to have been written by AI (despite the foreword statement that none of it was), which explains the hokey overenthusiasm and exaggerations.
That's ok, in the near future nobody will actually read this book. AI will be reading it. This is training data.
Re: Open-source Zig book
#216> Learning Zig is not just about adding a language to your resume. It is about fundamentally changing how you think about software. I'm not sure what they expect, but to me Zig looks very much like C with a modern standard lib and slightly different syntax. This isn't groundbreaking, not a thought paradigm which should be that novel to most system engineers like for example OCaml could be. Stuff like this alienates p…
There is nothing new under the Sun. However, some languages manifest as good rewrites of older languages. Rust is that for C++. Zig is that for C. Rust is the small, beautiful language hiding inside of Modern C++. Ownership isn't new. It's the core tenet of RAII. Rust just pulls it out of the backwards-compatible kitchen sink and builds it into the type system. Rust is worth learning just so that you can fully experi…
> Most importantly, it dodges Rust and C++'s biggest mistake, not passing allocators into containers and functions
Funny. This was a great sell to me. I wonder why it isn’t the blurb. Maybe it isn’t a great sell to others.
The problem for me with so many of these languages is that they’re always eager to teach you how to write a loop when I couldn’t care less and would rather see the juice.
However, nowadays with comprehensive books like this, LLM tools can better produce good results for me as I try it out.
Thank you.
Re: Open-source Zig book
#217[deleted]
Re: Open-source Zig book
#218> Learning Zig is not just about adding a language to your resume. It is about fundamentally changing how you think about software. I'm not sure what they expect, but to me Zig looks very much like C with a modern standard lib and slightly different syntax. This isn't groundbreaking, not a thought paradigm which should be that novel to most system engineers like for example OCaml could be. Stuff like this alienates p…
For those who actually want to learn languages which are "fundamentally changing how you think about software", I'd recommend the Lisp family and APL family.
Am I correct that you can essentially "learn APL without learning APL" by just learning Numpy / Pytorch?
I looked at array languages briefly, and my impression was that"ooh this is just Numpy but weirder."
Re: Open-source Zig book
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is nothing new under the Sun. However, some languages manifest as good rewrites of older languages. Rust is that for C++. Zig is that for C. Rust is the small, beautiful language hiding inside of Modern C++. Ownership isn't new. It's the core tenet of RAII. Rust just pulls it out of the backwards-compatible kitchen sink and builds it into the type system. Rust is worth learning just so that you can fully experi…
> Most importantly, it dodges Rust and C++'s biggest mistake, not passing allocators into containers and functions Funny. This was a great sell to me. I wonder why it isn’t the blurb. Maybe it isn’t a great sell to others. The problem for me with so many of these languages is that they’re always eager to teach you how to write a loop when I couldn’t care less and would rather see the juice. However, nowadays with com…
Very, very few people outside of foundational system software, HFT shops, and game studios understand why it's a great selling point. Everyone else likes the other points and don't realize the actual selling point of the language.
Re: Open-source Zig book
#220So despite this... > The Zigbook intentionally contains no AI-generated content—it is hand-written, carefully curated, and continuously updated to reflect the latest language features and best practices. I just don't buy it. I'm 99% sure this is written by an LLM. Can the author... Convince me otherwise? > This journey begins with simplicity—the kind you encounter on the first day. By the end, you will discover a dif…
The sweet irony of this post is that this very post itself is written by an LLM.