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Comment by fuligo | Hacker News Reader

> He is not a messiah, it's already happening

That's a lot of negativity towards a guy who's said from the beginning he's just building a language that he wants to use himself. I don't think he's presented himself as "a messiah" in any way. He laid out some things that irk him in C/C++, and then he set out do make something that suits him better. These may not be the same things that are important to you (as demonstrated by your parallelism and concurrency criticism), but that's absolutely fine. People use different languages for different purposes and different tastes.

It worries me how makers are attacked here. "oh, we don't need that, X did the same thing ages ago" "why even bother if it doesn't do X" "oh dear, please not yet another X, people should just stop" "nobody needs X when we have Y1, Y2, Y3..."

That's some seriously bad attitude.

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All I am saying is it's better to communicate along the lines of "let's also explore this way of building games" rather than "nobody is doing anything worth looking at, garbage collection is a no go, too much safety is bad and it's a first initiative ever just like the moon landing (which was kinda secondary to actually going to space first time anyway)".

But he is quite smart, so some arrogance could be forgiven. He is also not afraid to say some fair and true things out loud:

> "...the web is a giant pile, I don't want anything to do with it, it's all horrible; it's not an exaggeration, anything to do with web is like so broken and it's so nasty and it's so hard to do good things...".

Maybe it's a correct attitude if we ever want to get rid of legacy crud like JavaScript and HTML...

> let's also explore this way of building games

That's what he said, isn't it? He also actively encouraged people to write their own languages which address what they care about.

> nobody is doing anything worth looking at, garbage collection is a no go, too much safety is bad and it's a first initiative ever just like the moon landing (which was kinda secondary to actually going to space first time anyway)

Those are his views, he needs those in order to make the new language. It's similar but not equal to your judgement of JavaScript and HTML. Those things are not bad per definition, they are just something you don't happen to like. The bigger theme here is that working with things that you don't like makes you unproductive.

So yeah, it does bother me a little when he says these things so emphatically, but they're still well distinguishable from global blanket judgements because they are expressed within the context of designing the new language.

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