Amusingly, this post violates Zig's own code of conduct: https://ziglang.org/code-of-conduct

> Examples of behavior that contribute to creating a positive environment include:

> - Using welcoming and inclusive language.

> - Being respectful of differing viewpoints and experiences.

> - Showing empathy towards others.

> - Showing appreciation for others’ work.

> created by monkeys

I don't particularly care for either Zig or Github, but...

they do precisely cite the technical issues. That snippet links to a Github discussion comment https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/3792#issuecomment-3...

(reproduced below)

"The bug in this "safe sleep" script is obvious from looking at it: if the process is not scheduled for the one-second interval in which the loop would return (due to $SECONDS having the correct value), then it simply spins forever. That can easily happen on a CI machine under extreme load. When this happens, it's pretty bad: it completely breaks a runner until manual intervention. On Zig's CI runner machines, we observed multiple of these processes which had been running for hundreds of hours, silently taking down two runner services for weeks."

"I don't understand how we got here. Even ignoring the pretty clear bug, what makes this Bash script "safer" than calling into the POSIX standard sleep utility? It doesn't seem to solve any problem; meanwhile, it's less portable and needlessly eats CPU time by busy-waiting."

"The sloppy coding which is evident here, as well as the inaction on core Actions bugs (in line with the decay in quality of almost every part of GitHub's product), is forcing the Zig project to strongly consider moving away from GitHub Actions entirely. With this bug, and many others (severe workflow scheduling issues resulting in dozens of timeouts; logs randomly becoming inaccessible; random job cancellations without details; perpetually "pending" jobs), we can no longer trust that Actions can be used to implement reliable CI infrastructure. I personally would seriously encourage other projects, particularly any using self-hosted runners, to look carefully at the stability of Actions and ask themselves whether it is a solution worth sticking with long-term when compared with alternatives."

----

I agree that the writing in the blog post is more colorful than precise, but sanitizing every bit of expression dulls the internet. Humans invented language for a reason.

> But leave ad hominems like "losers" and "monkeys" out of it.

Ad hominem happens when someone undermines the argument based on the speaker's background. Here they are not undermining any argument. They're just name calling. This is name calling, not ad hominem.

Seems like Andrew realize how insane it was name calling fellow software engineers and updated his post to not call Github engineers "monkeys" anymore. Still a shame he did it initially, and that he didn't apologize for it, but removing that is better than nothing.

Yeah this is pretty embarrassing.

I get frustrated with tech all the time! I get it. Grr when Actions feels so irritatingly misbehaved…

But how you handle or fail to handle your frustration demonstrates the competence of your character and speaks volumes of what you’d be like to work with.

It's okay to bring some "natural" language in technical communication. It feels more humane. All the whitewashed corporate language, riddled marketing bullshit feels so soul dead.

Well at least he's being a jerk on his own blog here, so it's easy to ignore. I've seen instances of him unreasonably lashing out without the decency of understanding others' writings first on third party properties. A quick search turned up https://discourse.llvm.org/t/rfc-libc-taking-a-dependency-on... can't remember the details of other instances.

I agree that he came out blasting, and the language and tone, particularly at the beginning are pretty off-putting. That being said, having read the full post, I can't say I disagree with the motives and point of view.

He probably read too many Linux kernel mailinglist posts recently.

But I agree on the Devon Zuegel praise. Most of the good devs and managers are gone. Only brian for the git SHA-256 migration is still there I think, though he got no time finishing it.

As a former JavaScript developer and current JavaScript hobbyist I see why this article’s language is deeply offensive. Most employed JavaScript developers absolutely suck at what they do and are highly sensitive about it. Everything other than praise is offensive. The surest indication of maturity is abandoning politeness in favor of evidence, empathy, or stronger arguments.

On the other hand Zig is often regarded as the fastest executing modern programming language. They have earned the ability to complain about performance like no one else. The article cites precise issues they have with GitHub.

Furthermore JavaScript, when not written by monkeys, is extremely fast which further qualifies their complaint. For example I have a large SPA that loads in the browser from across a network in around 0.065 seconds and achieves full rendering and state restoration in about 0.135 seconds. If I drop the largest one feature from that SPA I can get full rendering and state restoration in about 0.08 seconds. Your typical JavaScript developer, on the other hand, struggles to copy/paste code into a JSX template someone else defined with no idea how to measure performance. To me that’s what’s offensive.

I much prefer the authors of anything on the internet be honest about what they think instead of self-censoring their language. I really thought we all agreed on disliking Newspeak ?

This writing made me curious enough to click the provided citation though, and I'd have to say "monkeys" is really being kind if we take into account the combination of code quality issues, lack of surrounding process, and _what_ these code quality issues are affecting (the criticalness of the path).

For those who haven't seen the actual issue that links to, I'd take a closer look. Pretty insane: https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/3792#issuecomment-3...

Look at the issue linked. While I don't think that language is preferable, at some point we need to call out terrible and lazy code.

> Stuff that used to be snappy is now sluggish and often entirely broken.

and as of when was GitHub known for its snappiness?

You're right, I've been hearing lots of good things about Zig and I wanted to check it out but I'm glad I saw this post. I want no part of this thing.

I've heard people call other people "monkeys" before in a work setting. it's never good. Fact is, you don't need to call anyone names or insult them.

The takeaway for me is that the Zig project is led by people who are extremely immature and toxic. I simply don't trust any decision these people make. If you can't bring yourself to respectfully disagree with other human beings, if you resort to calling names and insults targetted at developers because of bugs, then i don't trust you to not backdoor your own code, or do something harmful to those who rely on your work because of some drama, spat or activism.

Even if actual political activists did this it would be unacceptable. If you called Netanyahu a monkey because of his Gaza genocide, most people who are pro-palestine will try to cancel you! Not because they think highly of him, but because it hurts the cause more than it helps.

Andrew: It seems you don't respect your own self or your community enough to set an example of decorum and civility. You've made Zig a platform for your own personal shitposting. Please do better!

i think the word "losers" was replaced by "rookies"

God this entire thread is just people defending him as “a breath of fresh air” and “just using human language”. There is something in people that makes them enjoy seeing others belittled like this. A complete lack of empathy, because no one would like to be treated this way themselves, but are perfectly happy seeing others treated this way. One commenter justifies it by saying “if I’m fucking up, it’s ok to speak to me this way”. Sure guy, we believe you.

This reminds me of when Linus Torvalds would lose his shit now and then and launch gratuitous personal attacks at people who had made mistakes. Comment sections would be filled with folks laughing at Linus’ latest victim. “Couldn’t be me, I would never make this mistake”. Even Linus admits he was wrong to treat people this way and he’s taken time off to work on himself and become a better person. But there is still no shortage of people who enjoy seeing pain inflicted on others, nor people larping as a younger Linus.

Yea... Nail in the coffin on them for me.

Eh I thought it was on point. The github CEO talking about adopt ai or get out uses no curse words or direct insults, but i found it far more threatening and distasteful.

Hackernews seems to consistently believe that you can be terrible as long as you're polite.

Quite on-brand of Zig, though.

Well said. It's not good to see such arguments like these.

Oh no! Anyways... I love zig and I'm glad they're moving off what GitHub has become, not least because enough high profile projects leaving might make them focus on what matters again.

But he is right

It means to be snidely controversial.

> Putting aside GitHub’s relationship with ICE…

If you actual actually wanted to put that aside, you could have…put it aside.

(Plus it being weird on a substantive basis. Selectively blacklisting specific government agencies…that’s just not a sustainable approach.)

> eager to inflict some kind of bloated, buggy JavaScript framework on us in the name of progress

Could someone elaborate what that JS framework is? Is this recent?

I think GitHub was built on Rails, and the UI has changed relatively little in the past few years.

Kicking up is very different from kicking down. Zig is not kicking down here.

Agreed. Came here to point out that the lack of professionalism and common courtesy here is reminiscent of the dark entitled days of open source in the late 90s that had attitude of "We build free software so we can tell you to go fuck yourself.". Hope we're not headed back there.

And insulting publicly developers like that isn't ok.

Came here to say that. Killed my curiosity towards Zig in an instant. What a disrespect.

A pity. Saw Zig as something rising but with this kind of toxicity, no thanks.

Monkeys, LLMs, coding agents, AI - are all synonyms for me. Not to be confused with actual living things.

The unfortunate truth is that this is where we are as a society. It doesn't reflect poorly on them. It reflects well. They're straightshooters. Theyre not afraid to speak candidly (your definition of candid may differ). They inject humor. You may not like it personally, but it doesn't reflects poorly even if it should.

We're at the tail end of a long decline.

I thought people knew andrewk was an ahole? I thought that was his supposed charm? Like Linus.

I mean https://github.com/ziglang/zig/pull/24317 wasn't that long ago.

It doesn't reflect well, but also, is it not fairly par for the course from a BDFL type? Surely Linus Torvalds has said meaner things at some point on a listserv. Why does this guy get blasted for it? Because people still have generally positive sentiment towards Github? Just a day or 2 ago some other article was making similarly "ad hominem" attacks towards anonymous Youtube PMs, it got tons of upvotes and nobody clutched their pearls for the poor PMs. The Github/MS engineers who maintain actions (whose poor performance probably isn't even the result of any single individuals bad code), will be fine.

Seems like the HN mob is just as capricious as the author in deciding who gets as pass or not.

Nah, fuck 'em. Call out corpo bullshit where you see it. Github is just LinkedIn for people with compsci degrees now.

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I agree that the article is strongly worded, and Andrew seems quite angry/frustrated. However, it also gives me flashbacks of how it was back in the golden days, when Linus was calling wannabe kernel contributors idiots who should have died because they "couldn't find their mothers tit to suck on".

Having low patience is a quirk of our nerd culture, and now that the woke season has ended, it seems to be going back to how it has always been!

The "monkeys" here are clearly refering to those kinds with typewriters.

We're past the point of civility when it comes to things like github and M$0FT's involvement.

> bloated, buggy JavaScript framework

Isn't that the unfortunate status quo? At least hard requirement for JS, that is.

Google's homepage started requiring this recently. Linux kernel's git, openwrt, esp32.com, and many many others now require it too, via dreaded "Making sure you're not a bot" thing:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44962529

If anything, github is (thankfully) behind the curve here - at least some basics do work without JS.