alt Hacker NewsThe last paragraph captures the essence that all the PL theory arguments do not. "Zig has a fun, subversive feel to it". It gives you a better tool than C to apply your amazing human skills, freely, whereas both Rust and Go are fundamentally sceptical about you.
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Self-aware people are mindful about what "future them" might do in various scenarios, and they plan ahead to tamp down their worse tendencies. I don't keep a raspberry cheesecake in my fridge, even though that would maximize a certain kind of freedom (the ability to eat cheesecake whenever I want). I much prefer the freedom that comes with not being tempted, as it leads to better outcomes on things I really care about.
In a sense, it is a powerful kind of freedom to choose a language that protects us from the statistically likely blunders. I prefer a higher-level kind of freedom -- one that provides peace of mind from various safety properties.
This comment is philosophical -- interpret and apply it as you see fit -- it is not intended be interpreted as saying my personal failure modes are the same as yours. (e.g. Maybe you don't mind null pointer exceptions in the grand scheme of things.)
Random anecdote: I still have a fond memory of a glorious realization in Haskell after a colleague told me "if you design your data types right, the program just falls into place".
I for one welcome the use of type systems and PL research to guide me in expressing my programs in correct ways and telling me when I'm wrong based on solid principals. If you want to segfault for fun, there's a time and a place for that, but it's not in my production code.
I mean, if we're going to go there, you could take it a step further: Zig allows the programmer ego to run wild in a way that Rust and Go do not.
This is perhaps somewhat natural; people like and want to be good at things. Where you fall on the trade off is up to you.
When it comes to our ability to write bug-free code, I feel like humans are not actually not that good at writing bug-free code. We just don't have any better way of producing software than that, and software is useful. This doesn't mean we're particularly good at it though, just that it's hard to motivate people to spend effort up front to avoid bugs when the cost of them is easy to ignore in the short term when they're not obvious. I feel like the mindset that languages that try to make them more apparent up front (which I honestly would not include Go as one of) are somehow getting in the way of us is pretty much exactly the opposite of what's needed, especially in the systems programming space (which also does not really include Go in my mind).