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Comment by j-pb | Hacker News Reader

I don't quite get why this is flagged, hence I vouched for it.

Calling someone a "full time safety coomer" seems innapropriate for someone holding the title of "vp of community" in the Zig foundation.

It certainly makes me reevaluate the zig community, which thus far was at times a bit childish, but always friendly.

While I see this might violate "Eschew flamebait.", a constructive reflection of the interactions between the rust and zig community still feels like a worthwhile endeavour.

Edit: After some research it seems that the author has since apologised https://twitter.com/croloris/status/1568704125826748416

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Your second sentence answers your first. On HN, let's stick to the intellectually interesting topics and steer clear of the ones that are mostly just drama.

This is particularly important here, because both of these languages are popular topics already. We don't have space for all of them—frontpage space is the scarcest resource on HN—so we need to be discriminating about which are the best ones.

What even is a "$language community"?

Lately it seems like everything has some weird community aspect to it that becomes relevant because (?), single player games have communities now, even brands and, I guess now, programming languages(certainly enough to have a VP of community). Sure stuff like comp.lang.$language has been a thing for forever but that was not at that level.

I probably went into a bit of a ramble but the point i'm getting at is that odds are this "community" is most likely not representative of the people that actually use the language and to not assume people who do are automatically part of it, not saying you were, but some words of caution I suppose.

And furthermore, although that is unrelated to your point but more in a general statement for the younger people: You don't need to join a community or even talk to people to use a language or api or whatever, they're tools and using them or not should be based on where your technical interests lie or what you're trying to solve, not trying to be part of a social circle where the only thing you have in common is that you all wrote some lines of code in a certain script. Don't let yourself be defined by such things and don't do it to yourselves.

Open source projects definitely have communities and it’s not an artificial thing. You have the developers and consumers of the project and they have a lot of social interactions.

Neither are the other communities listed artificial(maybe the brands? not sure). Open source projects communities I'd relate more to the comp.lang.$language, and I guess the social interaction would be relevant, but are there really enough people contributing to a project to have a "vp of community"? this is what raised the red flag for me, well that and someone making up a "cute" name to refer to themselves as part of an in-group like languages were youtube channels("Rustaceans"). I guess the edit I made would clear up where I was with my previous comment.

Must be a generational thing or something. I've used a ton of languages and I've never interacted with the "community" of said language.

I might've been on an (unofficial?) IRC channel for the language, but that's about it. Never felt the need to belong in a community for a hecking programming language =)

IIRC the trend, including the obligatory cutesy avatar (and PL as a life-style choice /g), started with Java. And Java was ~coincidental with internet breaking out of universities. So my guess would be that it's 'an internet thing'.

p.s. 'Rotary Club' popped into my head after posting this. Possibly this is a manifestation of "learned" (lol) and professional associations for a domain that famously lacks professional credentials, so 'birds of a feather' naturally form around the specialized tools and their users. And we get PL feel good conferences, the language hero (Gosling, Pike, et al.), the stuffed animals, and the rest of it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_societies#History

“I’m sorry” 10 hours late followed by an excuse, plus he doubled down hard after the first one.

Hard not to be turned off of the Zig language after this kind of thing. Looks like he deleted the original tweet and is in full damage control mode

I don't understand how this could turn you off. Is it good? Is it useful? Use it. Who cares if some community rep guy is a perfect princess or a bit of an asshat.

This sentiment ignores, that programming, like everything, is a social endeavour.

You aren't really hanging out with the guy who wrote that tweet when you use zig. And it seems a bit hasty to extrapolate his behavior to be representative of the entire community, if you think that matters.

Using a niche language often means interacting with its community. I don't mind if a couple of fans duke it out, but when somebody like Loris resorts to ad hominem attacks, that's pretty telling. Egos are getting in the way, they've lost sight of the goal and now it's just another content-free slapfest. It isn't a good look. If I report a bug in the language, is somebody important going to take it personally and flame me for it?

Nobody is going to take a bug report personally because it isn't the same as implying the project is pointless and even morally wrong whenever the opportunity arises.

I've seen developers take bug reports personally quite a few times in my career, and the behavior Loris exhibited today is a very common precursor.

I have found the Zig contributors to be quite reasonable when I have reported bugs and submitted patches.

Me too! But, communities change, and this is one that I care about, because the language is frikkin awesome.

For what it's worth, I only handle GH issues relative to the autodoc system. I can say with confidence that all Zig core contributors are nicer than me, although today this statement does sound less convincing than usual.

I acted out, and I'm acknowledging the mistake. If you want to submit a bug report, make sure to follow the template and you will be treated well.

I appreciate the humility here. For the record, I'm not immediately concerned about the Zig community; my comment above is more of an elaboration on why such behavior can be offputting.

I think your point was fair. I don't intend to bend to every single outraged comment on social media, but my ultimate interest is to experience (and contribute to) the best that computer science has to offer. Humility is a small price to pay for that as otherwise it's impossible to recognize one's own mistakes.

First, I’m not a zig user, or a zig community member so I don’t really care that much whether you use it or not. But it comes off as a bit immature to let a single person’s actions turn you off from an entire language. I’m sure it would be easy to find some shitty behavior from some individual in almost every community. There are dozens of examples in linux, in ruby, in python, in rust, etc.

Open source communities are not homogenous, and they involve humans. People have bad days, people say things that aren’t well thought out, some times it takes a while for someone to come around to why what they said was hurtful, counter productive, etc. I don’t know the country of origin for this person, but some cultures have a much more direct and confrontational style of communication.

Use the language or don’t, but if this is the reason you don’t, maybe spend some time reflecting on why a relatively unimportant interaction appears to have affected you so strongly.

The reverse happens too.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/MINASWAN

Anyways, Loris Cro is not a random single person, he's more like the public face of the leadership team. For context, Loris is framing the greater conversation as punching back against Rust's dishonest marketing practices.

Should this matter if you like to use the tool? Not for me. But I'm not going to be confused when people look at the PR smell and feel averted.

That's a fair argument. I should be understandably held to higher standards than the average community member. I got into a heated discussion and fell into one of the common social media fallacies, ultimately acting in a distruptive way.

As for the marketing debate, trying to manage expectations wrt to Zig is one of the main things that I do, and sometimes people do get too excited and imagine that the tool is able to do things that it ultimately cannot. Tampering that enthusiasm and trying to stay concrete is something that I try to do with great care. My impression is that when it comes to Rust, some of the arguments in extreme favor of rust (Rust protects you from everything) and also against Rust (Rust is useless because the compiler uses LLVM, which is C++) IMO both stem from mistakes in how the safety story is taught.

That said, I'm saying this to provide context to my perspective, not as a justification to my outburst.

I think this interaction looked particularly bad because the person you replied to was pointing out a true detail, in the common style of nerds pointing out details, and readers will generally not have context about your previous interactions with them.

Yes. It's don't think it's fair to called "a heated discussion". pcwalton made a small correction about a claim someone made concerning the database, and croloris/kristoff_it made a response he subsequently regretted and deleted. There was no heat until he introduced it.

pcwalton said on 9/9/2022 that Zig was "a massive step backwards for the industry". He believes that all new languages should be "memory safe"; anything that doesn't meet his definition of memory safe is against "consensus".

https://twitter.com/pcwalton/status/1568302065851707392

Patrik's comment came before croloris's flame, and around the same time Zig was praised in the recent GameJam thread. The trade-off between memory safety and performance triggered a minor flamewar which Patrick heated by asserting that Zig wasn't memory safe and it violated "consensus".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32783244

To slightly correct you, as I think you’re misreading the tweets, he said the change in the consensus of wanting memory safety to not caring about it was a massive step back for the industry.

He was asking if the idea of memory safety was consensus and didn’t say that things against it were not consensus.

> My impression is that when it comes to Rust, some of the arguments in extreme favor of rust (Rust protects you from everything) and also against Rust (Rust is useless because the compiler uses LLVM, which is C++) IMO both stem from mistakes in how the safety story is taught.

I see this, and I agree that rust evangelists often go way too far and motte & bailey in arguments about safety. These arguments are safe to ignore. More importantly, if you engage with that class of argument; there's no winning. You certainly won't convince them of a thing, but you risk looking the fool. Keep your head up and talk about the many merits of Zig.

I see the opposite as an equally big problem: bad messaging creates Rust haters who occasionally try to interact with the Zig community, lowering the quality of the community experience if not pushed away. That's another thing that I've been doing and thus fueling my annoyance towards bad messaging around safety.

As I said in a few places, I do apologize for the outburst. Deleting the tweet is part of showing that I do mean to take back my words. As for the time delay, some of it is because it took me a bit to cool down, some of it is just that I wasn't checking on Twitter. One of my usual rants is that I keep Twitter notifications disabled and that the app keeps nagging me about it.

> Hard not to be turned off of the Zig language after this kind of thing.

can you explain that? I see this as one person (a person who is not the Zig language itself) having an opinion, being passionate about it, then realizing a mistake was made, and then learning from it and (very likely) becoming a better person for it?

or are you really someone who thinks "Eric Clapton is super duper racist so it's hard not to be turned off of music entirely"

I do what the person behind those tweets did very often, on this site, and every time I realize my mistake and become a better person because of what I learn.

The Zig language community is small. I think it’s more comparable to “Eric Clapton is a valued member of the local music scene, so I’d rather not engage with that scene”.

Not that he’s actually comparable to Eric Clapton, but yknow.

Some degree of childish-ness is to be expected from a language that's young. I'll snicker at the "coomer" comment when I get home from the office, but it doesn't change the fact that I won't be using Zig at work anytime soon. Not for anything serious, at least.

To be clear, the comment changes nothing about Zig's nonexistent viability in a professional space. As a career C programmer, I believe that Zig has always been every luddite's backhanded answer to Rust made manifest.

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