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I’m actually very curious to see that! I’m not sure what the angle espoused there is, but it seems fun at least from the perspective of academic science and technology studies to consider. This person might be going through a few too many scales to make meaningful commentary there though… In any case, there can be interesting connections and bidirectional influence found between technical systems and social organizations/politics/commercial industry, especially when it comes to things like how standards are defined over time. Even selecting the standardized sizes of containers for shipping and the technical design of connectors between shipping containers/cranes for picking them up has an interesting social and economic history that touches on questions of changing relationships to labor in post-war America!
This guy might be spouting total nonsense, but it seems interesting and fun to read either way!
Edit: I’m also not sure why trying to understand relationships between technical entities (like a programming language) and the systems it exists within, even if misguided, disqualifies the outputs of this person? Maybe there are plenty of other reasons, and maybe what they were saying was in fact batshit, but with zero context, I’m genuinely curious to learn more about what was said that was so crazy!
It's a reaction video to John Blow reacting to a Rust game-dev talk. He talks about how ownership is an economic concept, hence not applicable to programming and that's why he doesn't like the borrow checker from Rust. His personal philosophy is that "if you make the mess, you clear it up", so GC is bad because you are flouting responsibility for the memory you allocate. Exceptions are also bad for similar reasons (you shouldn't propagate errors so it's bad to have a convenient syntax for doing so).
Everything I've seen from him has been miles from the creators of Zig. To be frank, I think a lot of Odin's good features are just copied from Blow's previews of his Jai language. Not a bad thing in isolation, but it's a huge contrast to Zig which seems inspired by actual problems faced by programmers instead of crack-pot philosophy and a sense of righteous sense of superiority.
You could have criticized the language itself. Instead you completely dismiss the language because you didn't like an analogy the creator made. You don't even bother to link the video where the author made the supposedly bad analogy!
I would encourage readers to consider the language for what it actually is. Please don't dismiss anything because a random internet commenter claims the person made a bad analogy.
It's beyond absurd to call someone "truly clueless" when that person has in fact created a programming language that is moderately successful and in production use. That's a far bigger accomplishment that virtually everyone here, myself included, can claim! https://jangafx.com/software/embergen/
Bah hum bug.
I'm judging the book by its cover, because that's what covers are for.
There is no one who has created anything for which there isn’t some detractor who has deemed the creator to have bad ideas or communicate in an unacceptable way. Literally every single HN post ever could have someone reply with “this person said an unrelated bad thing and therefore should be ignored”.
Comments like yours simply aren’t helpful and make HN worse. IMHO.
This is a deep mischaracterisation of my perspective. It is not that has said a singular unrelated thing, but that he has made a pattern of saying many bad related things, such as "I will not support convenient error propagation because you shouldn't propagate errors", or "OOP and FP are bad concepts practised by dogmatic people who don't know what they're doing".
I think your issue here is one of trust. I have reached a conclusion based on what I've seen, and you don't trust that it's accurate. You think I'm being disingenuous in some way, cherry picking bad quotes or whatever. It's fine not to trust people, but you should actually look into the matter instead of just making a fuss. When you see someone giving their opinion on something and you don't like it, here are some more productive things you can do: ask for evidence, provide a counter argument (supported by evidence), or even simply express that you disagree (what is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence). Telling someone "you shouldn't have said that" is the worst of these options.
I don't think you're being disingenuous at all. I think if you have complaints about the language you should express them directly. Attacking the author as a means to dismiss the language is lame. And if you're going to do that you should provide a lot more evidence than a vague, non-specific comment about a supposedly bad analogy. If you want to criticize the philosophy of the language (anti-OOP, amongst other things) that's great. But you didn't do that.
Let me re-iterate: in the future you should avoid posts that attack the author rather than the idea, call someone totally clueless, and don't present actual evidence. It sounds like you have an opinion formed from a variety of factors. Next time I would recommend you criticize the language at face value. If you haven't spent enough time with the language because you've dismissed it based on a proxy heuristic then I would recommend simply not posting that comment on HN.
If this is your view, then my comment was not intended for you.
> If you want to criticize the philosophy of the language that's great.
I did not want to do that. I wanted to express the true sentiment that I am not going to use this language because I do not trust its creator.
> I would recommend simply not posting that comment on HN
> you should avoid posts that attack the author rather than the idea
That is your opinion. With respect, I do not care and you make no strong case for it. Many people use my same heuristic. They are my target audience and they would like to know about stuff like this. Just because you don't care about some piece of information doesn't mean it should be suppressed.
All you have said here is that I shouldn't express my opinions because you disagree with them.
Sorry but there’s a difference between “a bad man had some clever ideas” and “a stupid man had some clever ideas”. The latter is extraordinarily rare.
Here let me help. Based on what I’ve seen James_K is a clueless person and you shouldn’t trust their opinion on anything. :)
In that same video I was talking about, he dismisses all users of OOP and FP as dogmatic and clueless. He is willing to call others' intelligence into question to sell you his language, so I will do the same for him to sell you on not using his language. Fair, no?
Mind linking to that?
Just like Sapir-Whorf, likely the influence of our society isn't as pronounced as they're suggesting but there's likely a grain of truth that many people approach problems by using ideas from their collected experiences. Similarly, approaching problems in different ways from what we're used to can also be equally challenging due to our lack of prior experience.