Zig Zen Update

(codeberg.org)

60 points | by tosh 2 hours ago

4 comments

  • mcherm 1 hour ago
    Nicely done!

    I always felt that Python's "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it." was a bit of a mess.

    Obviously (to anyone who was around at the time), that plank was written in response to Perl's motto: "There is more than one way to do it."

    Zig's original take on this, "Only one obvious way to do things" seems even worse. You see, both languages agree that Perl had it wrong: it is unhelpful to have several different ways to write any future. But they went a little too far: it is not actually bad for it to be possible to write the same thing in more than one way.

    Zig's new phrasing: "There is an idiomatic way to do it." captures the CORRECT alternative to Perl's motto. It is not important that there be no alternative ways of writing something, Rather, it is important that there be a single idiomatic way to write it.

    • Fraterkes 1 hour ago
      I think people criticize that line in the zen of Python because Python has now become very maximalist. On it's own merits, I think "There should be one obvious way to do it" is much better, less clunky, than "There is an idiomatic way to do it".

      Also, importantly, the Zen of Python is kinda written as a set of ideas that Python should aspire to ("there should be one obvious way to do it") instead of a sales pitch of Python's merits. I prefer that.

  • Validark 1 hour ago
    Glad to see "Together we serve the users" come back. I miss the old Zig readme that said Zig comes with an MIT license and a humble request to build software that serves the users.
    • JakobJK 1 hour ago
      It was already there though.
  • rowbin 1 hour ago
    I'm out of the loop. Is there any context? Can't pick up on what really changed here.
    • dgellow 1 hour ago
      The link shows the exact diff
      • rowbin 1 hour ago
        I saw what changed syntactically. I meant I don't really understand what changed semantically. And whether there is any context to why the change was necessary.
        • dgellow 1 hour ago
          The commit message feels clear to me? It seems Andrew wanted to clean the zig zen slightly, it’s not a big change:

          > - rewordings

          > - "memory is a resource" goes without saying

          > - emphasize the final point

  • melon_tusk 1 hour ago
    I don't see how Zig will ever contend with Odin, Jai, C3 and others when they drive away half of the prospective users with activism.
    • jordand 11 minutes ago
      Activism as in their move away from GitHub? Andrew K recently said in the JetBrains interview that because of moving away, their CI/CD now actually works.
    • dom96 57 minutes ago
      What activism is that?
      • kristoff_it 54 minutes ago
        trying to make good software :^)
        • quarkz14 47 minutes ago
          truly a tragedy! how dare you make good software!?!
      • IshKebab 14 minutes ago
        I think they banned AI and moved from GitHub to Codeberg. They don't seem too controversial to me, and IMO they've already comprehensively trounced Odin, Jai and C3.
      • sgt 18 minutes ago
        I've never seen any activism from the Zig crowd (I assume you need Woke and rubbing "pride" or "Ukraine" into everything). Did I miss something?
        • midnight_eclair 10 minutes ago
          > I assume you need Woke and rubbing "pride" or "Ukraine" into everything

          wow, what a self report

    • logicchains 46 minutes ago
      Still less activist than the Rust community; nobody's getting death threats for writing unsafe Zig.
      • Permik 8 minutes ago
        I'm not sure that if this is an obvious question that has been gone through already, but have any of the death threats relating to Rust stuff actually been "verified" or is it just an opinion that has been repeated enough times until it has been accepted as truth?

        Just the open amount of discontent towards the language and the community, creates the perfect storm for a malicious individual to pose being a Rust developer that sends death threats for doing things that are not aligned with the values of the language/community.