> Kinda wish the author would attempt to collaborate rather than write stuff like this and I’m too dumb for Zig’s new IO interface but, whatever, it’s their blog so they can do what they want.

Damn, Andrew Kelley really come across as a dickhead when taking any bit of criticism about his language, often painting them as bad actors trying to sabotage the language.

This isn't the first time he repeats this behavior.

EDIT: https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=45119964 https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=43579569

> any bit of criticism about his language

I'm not even sure that it's criticism. I read it as a genuine open question.

At least in my experience, asking questions like this through GitHub issues or a mailing list are met with negativity. I don't want to post through a channel where I'll get a snide, terse response from a maintainer. I'd much rather post to my blog audience, who I find to be generally knowledgeable and friendly enough to already be following me. And if I found an answer, I'd post about it and explain what I learned in the process, linking from the existing post.

In a lot of ways, I think Andrew's response is exactly the sort of flavor of reply that I would have expected no matter what channel the question had been posed through, and that's exactly why I wouldn't have gone through those channels if I was the author. His reply didn't answer the question aside from implying it's maybe an issue, nor did it invite feedback.

Yeah, and his behavior in this LLVM discourse thread made me not want to ever try Zig: https://discourse.llvm.org/t/rfc-libc-taking-a-dependency-on...

That was not my takeaway from his comment at all.

Idk, Andrew's comment seems fair enough to me.

Andrew may be expressing frustration or dismay or annoyance in that statement, but he is not definitively "painting them as bad actors trying to sabotage the language". You are HEAVILY reading into his statement.

He only said he wishes the author would have taken a different approach. So what? Why does everyone have to jump in and start psychologizing or essentializing Andrew based on one paragraph?

Why does one paragraph have to say so much about who he is as a person? Even if it did piss him off for a few hours, so what? He's not allowed to wish someone took a different approach?

I tend to think Andrew Kelley is a great guy, not just technically but as a person. And I think that because I've listened to him talk for dozens of hours. I can guarantee you that that one sentence he wrote is not the beginning of a character assassination campaign against the author of this blog.

He made Zig because he wanted to put something good into the world and improve the state of software. How about we include that in our analysis of Andrew's character? I'll leave it to the reader to consider whether the multi-year full time dedication to Zig should be weighed more heavily than a personal feeling he had for two minutes that he expressed respectfully without attacking anyone's character.

Nothing wrong/strange in those posts.

In any case I've seen how communities treat the authors of important projects that touch their livelihood or habits to be unsurprised an author may lose it at times.

I know what you mean, but name-calling has got to be one of the worst ways to call for some decorum. It just leads to flame wars. (Be the change you want to see, and all that.)

Interesting. I liked the candid honesty.

yup, he's also got a consistent history of aggressively disparaging and misinformed comments about go, fwiw