alt Hacker NewsI think like most people, I don’t have a problem with Andrew “calling a spade a spade,” even if I find his reasoning motivated. The bigger problem with the post is that it talks out of both ends of the mouth: it’s clearly meant as a personal attack, but also insists that it isn’t.
When I read the post, my first thought was that I wouldn’t want to build things in Zig, because any technical decision I make, good or bad, might subject me to this kind of article from their BDFL. I can’t conceive of the leadership of the Python or Rust or any other community I’ve ever worked with doing something like that.
Replies
If you don't intend to write misleading stuff that makes Zig look bad when you leave and if you avoid ghosting the Zig foundation in scheduled meetings you had with them, I suppose you should be good.
This is not just a random blog post or technical decision, it’s literally a trillion dollar company’s marketing department deciding to attack and slander Zig.
Insane that people + tokens are slobbering to rush to Clownthropic’s defense when the whole migration and subsequent blog post was just sour grapes about the Zig project’s no slop policy.
And this is a warning shot from Anthropic intended to have a chilling effect, we have tens of billions of dollars at our disposal and if you take any stance we don’t like that undermines our narrative we will fuck with your shit and throw billions of dollars of muscle at rewriting you or trying to make you irrelevant.
> I can’t conceive of the leadership of the Python or Rust or any other community I’ve ever worked with doing something like that.
At least for Rust, part of this is because there is no BDFL, by design. Python has moved away from the BDFL model as well, IIRC. Individual contributors can get mad and write angry personal attacks, but there’s no face of the language like there is with Zig.