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Comment by indigoabstract | Hacker News Reader

It's controversial because of how he makes fun about the people using and promoting other languages, like Rust. I thought it was hilarious.

And in case you haven't noticed, C++ isn't seen in a good light anymore for some years now. There are a lot of loud voices saying its time has past and calling for it to be replaced with something newer and better.

It's all subjective anyway, but I resonate with the feeling of fun he describes when doing projects in C++. Feeling productive and being protected from whole classes of bugs common in C++ is all well and good, but he was talking about programming being fun and I do not get that same feeling when programming in other languages.

It's perfectly understandable that you don't feel the same way though. I hope you do when programming in your favourite language. Otherwise it becomes just something you do to pay the rent.

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> It's controversial because of how he makes fun about the people using and promoting other languages, like Rust. I thought it was hilarious.

But doesn't that completely ruin the point of the post? I agree with you that something feeling 'fun' is more personal, and that the criteria of what constitutes fun are up to the user. The author doesn't agree with that - you can either adopt the former point or promote the Right Way of having fun. Those snarky remarks made me put this blog into the second category. When you're so invested in your argument, even a fundamentally harmless post about having fun will get that language wars hit piece subtext.

If anything, they seem more like desperate cheap shots than arguments. Other people, the NSA etc dislike unsafe-by-default code? Well, they're just authoritarian anti-fun ideologues! Rust users bring up some of the same criticisms I recall in the last paragraph? Well.. uh... that borrow checker, am I right?

I think he was just making fun of people who inflate the importance of their language and their way too much and it should be taken in that spirit. There are good reasons why all these new languages like Rust and Zig popped up in the last 10 years or so and started getting traction. Obviously a lot of people were unhappy having C/C++ as their only choice for performance focused or system level programming. At least in the games business it still seems to be doing well.

But to get back to the point of the article, for fun solo projects, when the 'mood for coding' comes over, I may be biased, but I think C++ is still the best. It's like when building a prototype. You just want to test your idea and see how it looks and play with it and just worry about bugs and program correctness later. While coding it in Rust you'd have to spend extra time determining the correct memory ownership relations and that can break the flow.

After programming for 20 years, it doesn't come nearly as often as it used to, but I still get that feeling from time to time.

Zed is definitely the sort of person who can make an uncontroversial point sound controversial, yeah. I think we're in violent agreement here.

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