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▲ dataflow 3 days ago

> It's kind of strange to not engage with any of the points made in the article. Unlike you, I don't think the post makes them look childish at all. I think it raises a lot of valid points and makes me want to use Zig more.

I know nothing about the drama here other than what's in the blog post, but these feel more like unnecessarily public personal attacks which don't really reflect well:

- a stinky manager. Poor communication, unrealistic expectations, low empathy, no experience. Just a total shit show, from an employment perspective

- already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs

- their vague "sell some cloud something" business plan was a farce

▲ZeroGravitas 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

I also know nothing of the drama, but what I picked up from the first blog post was that even with access to near unlimited funds and unreleased god-tier coding llms from a trillion dollar AI corporation it was apparently impossible to fix a backlog of bugs in Zig code but it was possible to fix them by automatically doing a rewrite in rust.

I can see why that might feel like an existential attack on Zig even if starts with a bit about how great Zig is.

So pointing out that the zig code was full of bugs because the author was doing weird stuff and ignoring advice, couldn't hire/retain any good Zig devs because he mismanaged people and is the kind of guy to do a full rewrite because that's more interesting than fixing bugs or learning the old tools feels like stuff he'd want out there in the public domain.

▲asa400 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> So pointing out that the zig code was full of bugs because the author was doing weird stuff and ignoring advice, couldn't hire/retain any good Zig devs because he mismanaged people and is the kind of guy to do a full rewrite because that's more interesting than fixing bugs or learning the old tools feels like stuff he'd want out there in the public domain.

All of what you say may be true, but the point remains: the Bun project lead can do whatever the hell he wants with his own project. There is no objectively "right" path here, in a moral sense.

People are allowed to rewrite their own software whenever they want to for whatever reasons they want, people are allowed to be "stinky managers" (Andrew's words), people are allowed to only hire people who want to work 7 days a week, people are allowed to only work on things that interest them, people are allowed to write crappy, hacky code in their project.

What business is it of Zig's that Jarred is (apparently, secondhand) a "stinky manager"? What business is it of Zig's that Jarred wants to run his own company the way he wants to?

Going after the guy's character after he decided he wanted to go a different direction is _incredibly_ petty.

It's so easy to deal with this like a professional: "Zig and Bun are no longer affiliated. I thank Jarred for his contributions to Zig over the years and wish him and the Bun project the best." or some variant of that. Bland and corporate, but who cares? It's done. Move on. Save the grousing for the DMs, keep on attracting new contributors, avoid alienating bystanders/potential contributors, build your project.

This post does nothing to burnish the reputation of the Zig project or its leadership, and in fact has the opposite effect. The message from the top is apparently "it's fine to be petty and vindictive".

▲csande17 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> [T]he Bun project lead can do whatever the hell he wants with his own project. There is no objectively "right" path here, in a moral sense.

I think this is the exact point that the article was getting at in the last section. It is okay to not be very good at software engineering or people management! It is useful to know these things if you want to understand why the Bun project made specific technical decisions, but they don't make the people involved "bad people" in a more nebulous moral sense.

The lead developer of Zig is discussing these factors because the main technical decision was moving away from Zig.

▲jstrieb 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I agree with the spirit of what you're saying: that many aspects of this post seem unnecessary. But I do think there are reasonable answers to your (admittedly probably rhetorical) questions.

Zig is a relatively young language with a small community, and Oven/Bun is one of few places that someone could previously have written Zig code professionally. It's therefore Zig's business to make sure that either it's a good place to refer community members for work, or that they don't explicitly encourage people to work there. Likewise, as one of the highest-profile Zig projects, the community's leaders were understandably invested in making sure it represented the language well.

I feel like I am exactly the target audience for this post: someone who uses Zig regularly, but hasn't touched Bun, despite being aware of it. While I would have proceeded differently than Andrew Kelley here in terms of framing and phrasing (and leaving out some parts entirely), I do think reading this gave me new information about Zig's relationship to Bun. The specific dry, professional post you suggest wouldn't have given me any new information at all.

▲soerxpso 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> I can see why that might feel like an existential attack on Zig even if starts with a bit about how great Zig is.

The original post explicitly praised Zig, and seemed to be arguing more that Zig was a great tool for the initial version of Bun, but that Rust was better for their needs as Bun grew to a larger project with a larger contribution team.

That seems completely in line with what Zig claims its strengths are. Zig's response to "but memory bugs" has basically always been "Zig is not a language for a big tumultuous project that you're going to throw interns at."

▲krupan 3 days ago | parent [-]

It explicitly praised zig and then spent a long time implicitly damning it. The whole blog post said in short, "zig is awesome, but it's use led to endless memory related bugs in the bun code that we couldn't stay on top of, so we rewrote in Rust."

If you didn't catch that then I'm not sure we read the same article. I haven't gone past basic tutorials in either language and I was really starting to believe that zig must be worse than C or C++! After thinking about it for a minute I wondered if maybe the developer was actually, well, not very good. Andrew's blog post did a lot to explain to me the background behind this all. I really appreciated it.

▲krautsauer 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I actually don't have any personal criticisms of Jarred.

was the cherry on top.

▲dpatterbee 3 days ago | parent [-]

Those are not personal criticisms, those are all professional criticisms. There are many people who don't seem to know the different between work and life and so they may conflate the two, but to me it's pretty obvious.

▲dataflow 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> There are many people who don't seem to know the different between work and life and so they may conflate the two, but to me it's pretty obvious.

Nobody is conflating anything, you're just misinterpreting the same words with different meanings.

A professional criticism can, in fact, be unprofessional, and even a personal attack. These are not mutually exclusive.

> Those are not personal criticisms

You're using "personal" to mean "regarding non-professional matters", whereas others are using "personal" to mean "regarding the individual person themselves".

> those are all professional criticisms

You're using "professional" to mean "regarding the profession" whereas others are using to mean... you know, the opposite of "unprofessional".

▲dpatterbee 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Yes, professional has two meanings in use here. Professional as in relating to one's profession, and professional as in how one may be expected to behave when carrying out one's profession.

In my comment I was using the former.

I'm not really sure what you're on about me "misinterpreting" something. The author of the article claimed to not have personal criticisms, and I was pointing out that there's a standard interpretation of those words that is true.

▲bananaquant 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> others are using "personal" to mean "regarding the individual person themselves"

Following your logic, we cannot critique anyone in particular ever. How absurd!

> You're using "professional" to mean "regarding the profession" whereas others are using to mean... you know, the opposite of "unprofessional".

At the end of the day, it is the same thing. Person does what is their job according to common standards.

Andrew runs a software foundation, and it is his job to make sure that behavior of one of related projects does not disrupt the stream of all donations or bury his project under a pile of slop submissions. Highlighting the technical dysfunctions of the other project is an effective way to show the differences between the two. Do you have a suggestion that would be just as effective, while being more "professional"?

▲milch 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

I think there's a world of a difference between "you wrote some code and it sucks" to "you wrote some code and it sucks because you have beginner energy and live in a fever dream". The former can be an objective statement without attribution to personal failings, while the latter... not really. If I put the latter as a PR comment to my intern in the morning I would expect a meeting invite from HR by the afternoon at the latest

▲dminik 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Oh, you can actually. But you have to bring receipts, otherwise it very well could be libel.

▲dwattttt 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"a stinky manager ... Just a total shit show" are examples I would reach for to demonstrate someone is not being professional.

▲dpatterbee 3 days ago | parent [-]

I don't know why choice of language is having such sway in determining what you view as professional. Maybe it's just a cultural difference but where I'm from people just use the words they need to to communicate what they're trying to say. If something's a shit show I'd prefer someone just said it rather than dancing around it with corpo-speak.

▲dwattttt 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> I don't know why choice of language is having such sway in determining what you view as professional

This is a blog post: it's purely textual, language is the only thing it uses to convey meaning. The words chosen to do so reflect what the author thinks.

> where I'm from people just use the words they need to to communicate what they're trying to say

Yes. What ark is trying to say, via the words he chose, is what's earning him the description of "unprofessional".

He could say every factual thing in the blog post without being unprofessional, he just chose not to.

▲dpatterbee 3 days ago | parent [-]

I think you're, intentionally or not, misinterpreting my comment. Language is used to convey meaning, and Andrew wrote words that presumably meant what he meant them to mean. However, in many comments on here people are not commenting on "what he meant them to mean" and instead focusing on which words he chose to convey that meaning.

I'm sure Andrew could've switched out every word in the post and still conveyed the same meaning, and perhaps offended the peanut gallery's sensibilities a little less, but why should he?

In the example I was originally replying to, suppose Andrew had instead said "Jarred showed poorer than desired management abilities" and "Employees disliked working at Oven". Approximately the same message is communicated, a little watered-down maybe, but who's gaining from this tone-policing? Certainly not us, the readers. And I don't see how this affects how "professional" this is, unless "professional" is just performative nonsense and nothing to do with the substance of the text?

▲dwattttt 3 days ago | parent [-]

> And I don't see how this affects how "professional" this is, unless "professional" is just performative nonsense and nothing to do with the substance of the text?

It changes my opinion of whether I trust ark to actually be right, or whether he has (and will continue to) let his emotions get in the way. The particular quote I noted was

> We probably tried to tell you to try enabling it and you didn't listen. We have good advice, damn it!

He wanted to say this, more than he wanted to know if he was right. It reduces my trust in his judgement.

▲dpatterbee 3 days ago | parent [-]

Do you normally assume that if someone shows any emotion that that emotion is "get[ting] in the way"? People's emotions are influenced by real things, and they don't have to speak dispassionately about those things. Especially when the blog post is entitled "My Thoughts on ---".

I don't know what you're getting at with your final paragraph, I feel like he's in a pretty good position to assert something he probably did or did not do.

▲dminik 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

As someone from a cultural background that is considered very direct and blunt, I can say that there is a rather fine line between being direct and being an asshole.

This post devolves into a personal attack one sentence in. There was no reason to go into Jared's life at all to begin with. The entire post doesn't need to exist at all if you're confident that Bun leaving will have zero or even positive impact. Why turn an already negative event of a slop rewrite into drama? It's petty and immature.

▲dminik 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Also notice how I didn't have to bring up Andrew soiling his Pampers when he was a wee beginner.

▲Mawr 3 days ago | parent [-]

It's a good thing there's nothing of the sort in TFA then?

Quoting:

"He moved fast and tried a lot of different stuff, jumping head first into problems that he was not yet equipped to solve, leading to mediocre outcomes in terms of engineering, but learning a whole heck of a lot in the process. I see it as quite a healthy attitude, particularly for young people and students. This is the best way to level up and learn new things."

I don't know, maybe you just don't understand what he's saying here? Or rather, are applying some sort of a negative spin to what is a factual analysis of a valid approach to doing something?

▲dminik 3 days ago | parent [-]

My issue with the paragraph is that it doesn't really connect into anything meaningful. It's just saying that Jarred was a beginner.

The only connection it has is as a segue into calling Jarred a terrible manager here:

> It was at this point - when he suddenly became a manager - that this "beginner energy" started to hit differently for me.

Note how "beginner energy" is considered good in the first paragraph, but suddenly terrible when applied to a different thing here. Terrible work culture aside, and the fact that it seemingly worked out for those who joined aside, Jarred would obviously have beginner energy in management as well considering he's not done it before. Why is it suddenly bad here?

Honest question, is there any record of Andrew actually saying Jarred had "beginner energy," or was this invented for the post as well?

▲dpatterbee 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

If you view that first sentence as a personal attack I'm not really sure what response I can make here. As a sentence it almost says nothing at all. 'When Jarrad started he gave off a real "starting" vibe'.

Also I learned nothing about Jarred's life from this post, so I don't understand that point. That he lives or lived in San Francisco I guess, and didn't go to university?

▲dminik 3 days ago | parent [-]

Well, first off, it's literally the first sentence of a post which is ~62% about Jared, ~26% about the rewrite itself and 10% closing thoughts. It also sets up Jared as a beginner who apparently never learned.

Again, this post never needed to say anything about Jared. It looks weird to pull him in in literally the first sentence. It really shows what you're actually writing about.

▲dpatterbee 3 days ago | parent [-]

This blog post about Jarred never needed to say anything about Jarred? What on Earth does that mean? It is a response to a blog post written by Jarred, about actions taken by Jarred, and yet you think Jarred shouldn't have been mentioned.

▲dminik 3 days ago | parent [-]

It's not really titled "My Thoughts on the scumbag Jarred Sumner" though, is it? Nor does Jarred's post even mention Andrew by name.

Should Jarred's post have mentioned how Andrew kept bikeshedding Bun code style and how he always felt superior about others?

▲threatofrain 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's true, claims of professional dishonesty is a kind of professional criticism. Shall we begin discussing whether Jarred is the kind of person who makes up fake conversations about Andrew?

As fellow professionals in this field, shall we engage in this very professional debate about Jarred's honesty as a moral human being?

▲ 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]
[deleted]
▲voidhorse 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Maybe the only quoted text that I would read as a personal attack is

"already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs" and maybe "low empathy".

Just because the other bits are negative and not so nice pieces of feedback one wouldn't want to hear doesn't necessarily make them attacks.

An attack is often far more personal (making fun of you for aspects of your existence you can't control, touching personal subjects like families, etc). idk, maybe I'm just not soaked enough in the goo goo baby corporate saccharine LLM speak or something but this post felt tame to me, if a bit cheeky. Nothing but a thumb jab at worst.