There are astute comments about the post's tone elsewhere in this thread[0]
But this killed my hopes for Zig.
The drama is fun, and Andrew is maybe even admirable in his earnest, but this just isn't the kind of professionalism needed for a serious project. I know that's boring and uninspired, but that's what I want my tech stack and it's management to be.
Also, maybe Jarred was a net negative, but bun was also a really big project using Zig, and the project leaving isn't as good for Zig as Andrew is making it seem. It genuinely seems he's putting a lot of priority on purity and ideology over just growth of the language. And I am sorry, but adoption and reaching critical mass is an important part of a serious programming language.
The problem is that coding was sold as the pancea. If you were fired, "learn to code", if you're in prison, "learn to code", if you're in kindergarden, "learn to code".
Even in this article, it's talking about how it's a good way to learn math and formal thinking. Yea, as an application. If you want to learn math, learn some basic fundamentals tied specifically to math, and then come apply it to code.
Coding is like welding in that it's a useful skill, a craft unto itself, but also integral for modern day manufacturing that opens up a world of possibilities. You don't see welding being suggested as a form of excercise, or the ticket to being a multi-millionaire.
I hate that these discussions go nowhere because there's no common metric anymore.
I have no idea what stuff like "is it always perfect?" means because it varies so much from person to person. Too many people have different expectations, are working on different problems, or have different standards or goals for there to be a common constructive discussion.
> Is this just a naming quirk, or the start of them trying to monetize Vite?
VoidZero got acquired by Cloudflare, which gives out insane amounts of free services, I'd be very surprised if vite is the place they try start pinching pennies.
I just want to know how the avg. dev is using these things. I feel like it's a completely different world, and all the noise is from luddites, or spotify pushing 45000 deployments to prod per day.
It's so far from the days of you should try git because it's distributed, or intellij because it has great intellisense, or vscode cuz it's fast - where the value proposition was obvious and understandable.
It was the first seven floors. Coincidentally, also the floors most of the higher-ups don't work on. Or at least that's how it's being reported, so I don't think people's outrage is absurd.
I will die on the hill that Java was a good language, and had the potential to leapfrog us from where we are by at least a decade.
But it got hobbled by the awful, awful enterprise style culture, cultural misunderstanding of OOP (especially inheritance), and corporation shenanigans (fucking oracle).
Because, like many things in web, it's a patchwork of compromises due to legacy issues, rampant inconcistencies and trying to be too clever.
You get results where it's really difficult intuitively understand it because at that point you're not really meant to. Realistically, people just follow a guide, or some lib, and move on.
> The opposite of that has been happening for 20 years now with cloud compute.
It won't happen with AI models either.
AI is different.
Cloud computing genuinely is cheaper on average. It's better than paying for cisco servers, and at scale, it's cheaper than managed platforms (ala Heroku), and it's a coin toss for when you're in the middle ground and constantly approaching the point of rebuilding poor-man versions of existing products but with very very expensive engineering salaries.
In contrast, local models offer dramatic savings, and are magnitude of orders better in certain aspects: like stability - the performance is all over the place with traditional AI companies as they divert compute to their next big thing.
The benefits to maintaining your own infrastructure are pretty moderate to low, with very high risk.
And also, alternate models are pretty easy to use and easy to swap out unlike the vendor lock-in that exists with cloud services.
> The worlds is grim because billionaires have a large part of the cake and the rest has to fight over the crumbs.
et tu hn?
I am tired of seeing this nonsense on social media (it's particularly bad on reddit, where /r/antiwork and it's offshoots keep hitting the front page)
- Wealth is not a zero-sum game
- Yes, billionaires shouldn't exist because they're a symptom of a broken system
- And they don't exist on a long enough timescale, there's a reason why oil barons and railroad tycoon families are a shadow of their former selves, and why the richest people are all in tech/oil
- Billionaires and increasing income inequality are a symptom of a bigger problem. Musk wouldn't have as much money if his publicly traded stock wasn't as popular... among the public.
- Modern day securities are broken because they're poorly regulated because the public doesn't vote for people that would do the regulation.
Some guy just built a motion design tool in 4months - and it's impressive.
I've been building a design tool myself for many years and I like following this space, and also know how hard it is to build an editor (not just the code, but the product design as well). I've been following different subreddits (like /r/vibecoding) to see what people are building, and levels of delusion of capability is high. Lots of junk software that goes nowhere.
This might be the first thing I've seen that's genuinely quite impressive technically, and it's made by someone with domain experience, so even if there's lapses, overall, this seems actually useful.
When I first saw the post, I genuinely thought this was vapor ware because this kind of thing is quite difficult, and even with AI I hadn't seen other people build something. I often say, where's all the photoshop/illustrator/etc. alternatives. Well here's something. The guy did the interview where someone clicked around and actually built something. So it seems genuine.
The app itself has node-based editing, and layers, and timelines like After Effects, Cavalry (now owned by Canva), etc. This kind of procedrual workflow can be really powerful, and if it integrates with plugins (which it should be apt for), it opens up a whole world of possibilities.
Also bonus points for the website being quite nice as well. Really doesn't look vibe coded with gradients everywhere, and uppercase titles everywhere. But it still has a distinct aesthetic that really helps with branding.
My only consolation is that this is so obvious that it's not going to lead to a disaster. Things like the housing crisis happened because long-established institutions like credit ratings and mortgage lenders didnt do their jobs.
It's the swiss cheese model, hidden behind curtains.
This is like a giant sign saying you can buy $2 for a $1.
That is irrelevant to the topic of ownership since you bought the product, you can now update the code.
If you want, you can now change that behavior.
Whether that's allowed by the TOS and what the consequences to that are is also a separate issue. At that point, people shouldn't buy the product if they disagree with the conditions.
> So why is it OK for a software developer to just arbitrarily decide to flip a switch and remove my ability to use a product I paid for?
I see this argument repeated, and it's made exactly like this where it sets up a strawman and then brings up software.
No one is coming into your computer to repossess your software.
They are either turning off their servers, OR they are ending a subscription.
If you have a bus pass, you can do anything you want with the card. Your chisels being 50 years old, has nothing to do with you being able to ride the bus forever just because you bought a one-month pass.
But this killed my hopes for Zig.
The drama is fun, and Andrew is maybe even admirable in his earnest, but this just isn't the kind of professionalism needed for a serious project. I know that's boring and uninspired, but that's what I want my tech stack and it's management to be.
Also, maybe Jarred was a net negative, but bun was also a really big project using Zig, and the project leaving isn't as good for Zig as Andrew is making it seem. It genuinely seems he's putting a lot of priority on purity and ideology over just growth of the language. And I am sorry, but adoption and reaching critical mass is an important part of a serious programming language.
[0] esp. nilirl.