Comment by jamiejquinn 3 days ago
Ditto... I love Zig as a language but I worry the high-level community builders (including Andrew) are a little too antagonistic to foster a positive, tolerant, patient community in the long term. In saying that, my infrequent interactions in the reddit and discord are always pleasant.
He has a pattern of taking any bit of criticism of his language on bad faith, and immediately goes all defensive accusing the criticizer of being a psyop working with a rival language.
This is all childish and unacceptable behavior.
Actual Zig community spaces like Ziggit is very pleasant as far as programming language forums go. I think Zig just occupies a unique space in the language ecosystem (a very performance oriented, production oriented language that is not afraid to rapidly try things and throw them out if it doesn't meet expectations in practice - not many languages sit in the middle of this venn diagram) and people see it as an opportunity to gain a social foothold in something potentially great.
It seems like it might be in the nature of a language with these goals and this development process to attract people like this, no matter how warm and welcoming the community leaders are.
I don’t think Andrew is a bad guy, but his tone seems to attract a certain kind of person. All the technical people I’ve interacted with in the Zig community have been awesome, but for whatever reason it also attracts a lot of people who are just there to shit on anything mainstream.