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Comment by wk_end | Hacker News Reader

The author of this is the VP of Community for Zig; his only professional experience, according to LinkedIn, is in similar advocacy roles. It's an incredibly bad look for the Zig community then, in my opinion, for him - somewhat sarcastically and disrespectfully ("oh no!", "I already have to waste way too much time for other slow software to load") - trying to school Asahi Lina on "writing performance-oriented software" when she's one of the most impressive software engineers in the public eye right now.

This is just a FUD-y hit piece on RAII. It, frankly, smacks of Dunning Kruger (I know, not statistically a real thing, but rhetorically useful): a writer way beyond his depth hears someone praise RAII, and out of ignorance and professional obligations launches an attack by linking some canned "RAII Bad" sources, not realizing the person they're attacking knows vastly more about...well, basically everything, than they do.

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Oh, I didn't realize that. I guess I should add a disclaimer then: a mean and condescending tweet from him caused me to withdraw my sponsorship of Zig a couple of years ago.

This is not his best post, granted (there are some good ones).

That said, I think this is a very uncharitable read and resorting to ad hominom (he's not a real dev!) is uncalled for.

If you think the argument is wrong -say so. Refute it on its own merits. It gets no better or worse from it being said by him.

That also goes for Asahi lina - I find it so incredibly tiring when people's hero-worshipping of this admittedly great developer extends to thinking they are simply right about everything.

Carmack is a great dev, he likes his C and C++. Alexis King (Lexi Lambda) used to be a top lisper (likely still is), now a great haskeller. Rich Hickey and so on and so on. Point is - how do ypu reconcile the fact that these people hold wildly different ideas on what makes good programming and programning languages, some of them even changing opinions over their lifetimes.

Will you create a programmer godhood pantheon and claim Asahi Lina is the smartest person ever or write it off as "systems programming must be Rust"? I am curious.

Anyway, not aimed at singling you out, but the appeal to authority (Lina) as some way of saying " this is right, everyone else are wrong" is shoddy arguing.

> If you think the argument is wrong -say so. Refute it on its own merits. It gets no better or worse from it being said by him.

Thing is, one of their points is that the claims listed are unsupported. Challenging unsupported claims is an asymmetrical effort, and is of ill form - those making the claims should be the one providing evidence, the onus is on them after all.

I mean, him first? I definitely implied this, but admittedly others on this thread have made this more explicit: he doesn't really say anything here; he leans on other canned RAII-bad arguments without addressing Lina's points seriously and in good faith, presuming that she's "completely unaware of the downsides of RAII", that the code she's writing is going to have performance problems, that she - someone who's actually worked on the Linux kernel! - doesn't know about a completely imagined intolerance for RAII in the kernel. And as I mentioned, he was kind of a jerk about it too. I think I gave this post the response it deserved.

I know we want to live in a world where everyone rigorously logically defends every position all the time, but in life - especially now, in the world of the internet where everyone has a soapbox - we have to apply heuristics of credibility to make this manageable. "Some guy with limited experience who's paid to promote a programming language" has vastly less credibility than "Linux kernel developer who reversed engineered the M1 GPU" - he needs to come out with a very robust argument for us to take him seriously; instead he posted FUD.

I certainly don't think great devs are infallible. As a particular example - Hickey's a great dev. But I think Hickey's criticism of type systems in "Simple Made Easy" is a flawed argument. I've spent a long time thinking about why it's flawed. If I were to write a blog post about why it's flawed, though, I'd do my best to engage with it seriously; not just presume he doesn't know what he's talking about, presume his code is going to be riddled with type errors, link to some Haskell 101 and call it a day.

> presuming that she's "completely unaware of the downsides of RAII", that the code she's writing is going to have performance problems, that she - someone who's actually worked on the Linux kernel! - doesn't know about a completely imagined intolerance for RAII in the kernel. And as I mentioned, he was kind of a jerk about it too.

In short, and while I don't particularly like the term - he's a textbook mansplainer.

The fact that he thinks Rust forces mass discards shows how little he knows about Rust.

Looking at his social media, his first project with Rust was a month or two ago.

TBF, Asahi Lina's remarks on Zig weren't exactly a good look either (it essentially boiled down to 'Zig is bad because I don't like it') - that left a much worse taste in my mouth than anything coming out of the Zig community, especially since it came from a respected person who really should know better than to shit on other software projects.

I don't see anything in her language that can be interpreted as "Zig is bad", rather than "Rust fits my use case best" along with bullet points that explain that logic.

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