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Comment by tucnak | Hacker News Reader

Funnily enough, this has nothing to do with Zig... People will flag this because you simply can't challenge Rust, the poster child, where it's due; You have to understand that such thoughts are deemed almost "counter–revolutionary", i.e. the fight against the unsafe, evil, dirty hegemony of C/C++ must continue at all costs.

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Would you please stop using HN for flamewar, including programming language flamewar? One of the core principles here is not to let the forum to burn itself to a crisp like other communities which got consumed by such flamewar.

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

So how did Rust acquire this reputation to begin with? I've read about it and have written some. It's a nice language but not above criticism. Seems to have the usual modern language problems such as its own package ecosystem that's incompatible with everything else.

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.

I wish dang would remove the flag function or modify it in some way. I understand it's there to stop spam, flamewars, etc but it can be abused and kill any chance of a decent debate.

The issue is the expected value of the thread [1]. Decent debate is great but requires a more substantive starting point than usenet/mailing-list flamebait.

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...

It gets flagged because it's fairly shallow ("programming language advertising blurb is an advertising blurb, news at 11", without any useful in-depth argument that hasn't been rehashed to death) and pulling individual mailing-list or bug tracker quotes up seldom does any good, especially if comments like yours will try to turn it into a flamewar.

Interesting thought, I'll keep my eyes open.

Funny, because Rust is rather a side-note/example in Theo's post...

The thread topic is now: top the linked email’s exaggeration and make a programming language’s community sound even more like a revolutionary force. Go!

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