Theo de Raadt 'Re: new: lang/zig'
marc.info
marc.info
> I am sure both csh and php aspired to do the same.
And I am sure they didn't. Such a bad take...
Languages are very often designed with a use-case in mind, or with a set of goals or core tenants.
Since he highlighted PHP specifically, there's a nice quote on wiki:
> Early PHP was not intended to be a new programming language, and grew organically, with Lerdorf noting in retrospect: "I don't know how to stop it, there was never any intent to write a programming language [...] I have absolutely no idea how to write a programming language, I just kept adding the next logical step on the way."
If you look at different languages, they have different goals. Haskell was initially created to explore lazy-evaluation, one of Python's drives was to be extensible and to be friendly to use for people not familiar with programming (largely inspired by ABC)[0].
Please let people have their opinions, so don't try to overexpose them!
If the flamewars were more interesting, it wouldn't be such a big deal. But the comments in a thread like this are such weak sauce.
The creator of Zig got this right. If your language's binary interface is too complex, nothing else will even attempt to interface with it. Even some C features are too annoying to interface with. Newer languages either have insanely complex ABIs or are fully virtualized within a virtual machine written in C.
The OP is fine in its original context of an OpenBSD mailing list—that's a focused-enough system to respond coherently. A large, weakly cohesive forum like HN is more like all the mailing lists put together in a blender. Posting the same message to this context amplifies the provocation by 1000x, if not 100000x, and the thread will fill up with comments by the self-selected most-provoked on all sides. This leads to boring, shallow comments, an effect which compounds as more comments appear. This is a failure mode for HN.
We've learned over the years that threads are sensitive to initial conditions: the same forum can respond either substantively or with meltdowns on the same topic, depending on small perturbations. If the goal is high-quality discussion (or, let's be reasonable, as quality as possible under the circumstances), the place to focus on is the starting conditions.
When a provocative post like this gets flagged sufficiently to remove the thread from circulation, the flags are usually coming from a coalition of users: one set who dislike/disagree with the author, and one set who recognize the thread as a failure mode for HN. That goes for all provocative topics, not just programming ones.
[1] I've written a lot about this in terms of comments—i.e. a comment's quality is the expected value of the subthread that it is the root of—but as in many things, you can treat a submission as a kind of root comment and the argument works the same way: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
Funny, because Rust is rather a side-note/example in Theo's post...
Was it about his view on zig? Or his comment about rust??
See my comment below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26293035
But Sturgeon's Law applies even to what we fancy.
Actually Theo's message may not be so low-information in its original context, where there's a lot of shared state i.e. implicit information. But that doesn't carry over automatically. Posting a mailing list thread to HN is a lossy operation that way.
There’s not much to discuss here. Just accusations of propoganda.
He said Rust obviously had nothing and that proper privsep was exceedingly rare in languages other than C.
On privsep being rare outside of C? What's the measure? I suspect privilege separation is present or not more based on the type of software, not the language used. And I'm sure you can find bad/good examples in software written in C, Go, Rust, Zig, etc.
I know why. It's because Zig hasn’t proved that it can do what it claims to do.
Sounds like somebody is bitter.
I am not going to blame Rust for that. Rust is a language I have been meaning to look into and they have a need to be heard over the ruckus. Yet the preponderance of propaganda begs the question: is this real or is it going to be yet another language that fails to reflect the claims? While learning something new is wonderful, I would rather expend my energy on a language that has something genuinely interesting to offer.
But taking Rust as example?
Rust is the one language that delivered in terms of performance and safety.
Not recognizing how right TdR (and OBSD by extension) have been is a giant red flag to me. It would be a whole different deal if they didn't have years of track record showing their conservative approach was 100% justified.
Seriously, you can instead say that the description for newer programming languages tends to be subjective (which is IMO true). Then the discussion about regulating descriptions can follow. Instead you have this useless rant. The original link is correctly flagged, not because it is anti-Rust, but because it has no substantial values to discuss at all.
He has had much the same criteria for years. Do the work to prove it. I've often thought it would be interesting to map out the OpenBSD userland and figure out exactly what the work would be.
Side note, has anyone read a Java textbook? They are notable for not being able to go more than a page without extolling Java's virtues in a way that is repetitive and annoying.
(My experience with Rust textbooks was not like that. They tend to explain the drawbacks of Rust's "radical wager" with the stipulation that for the authors, the payoff is worth it.)
Propaganda, how do you think you hear about firefox everyday, everywhere, despite it having only just 3% user share
It was the same with rust
Propaganda machine works, just look at the USA
Firefox does offer unique privacy features which are not even a remote priority for Chrome and Edge (and IE) which do have the lion's share of the browser market.
And you are hearing about FF, mainly in tech-related forums and in places that people care about their freedom.
Sadly, the recent actual propaganda pushed by the Mozilla executives, especially that talk about "de-platforming" is beginning to question Firefox's main and only selling-point over its competitors.