← Back to context

Comment by dofm

2 days ago

FWIW I was really interested in Zig and now I see that its lead developer is thin-skinned and bitter and has confused minimal criticism of his project with an attack on his person.

This is such a bad look and it's also flatly self-contradictory. He spends time in his conclusion asserting he doesn't have any personal criticisms of Jarred but he's fully happy to claim, reframe and repeat everyone else's, even criticisms he evidently heard in private.

You can also see that it was incompletely rewritten from a pure, personalised and personally-directed rant: "I noticed that you…" does not belong with the rest of the text.

Whatever the merits of Claude-driven rewrites (I suspect few, long-term), the article he is responding to has little to none of the vituperative quality of his own.

I think if it needed a response, and I was this angry, I would have written this whole post as a draft, filed it away in Apple Notes, and then posted "I have, yes, seen the article on the Bun blog; you don't need to send me it anymore! I will respond to parts of it in the future as and when they are particularly relevant."

Writing the response post can be valuable as emotional release or exploration. Posting it in this sprawling, mean form was dumb.

This entire thread puts me out on devs. I stuns me that there are this many people who either excuse or cheer on being hateful. Wanting to use a project becaues the author was this rude....what?

Just a complete lack of emotional intelligence. You do not treat people like this.

  • I've read some of your other comments in this thread and I completely agree.

    It's dismaying how many devs seem unable to distinguish poor project leadership/communication from being a bold truth-teller "telling it like it is".

    This is a major project lead demonstrating that if things don't go well between him and you, he's going to retcon your whole relationship, collect gossip about your company and management style, chastise you for your life choices (taking venture capital?), talk shit about your code and your project, question your moral choices, and then publish all of it.

    This insistence on "being right" is really caustic. It's just ugly.

  • Bro lol is this like your first day on the job? The faux "brutal honesty" as a personality trait is what smelly antisocial computer nerds have always been known for. Just ignore them.

    • This is true to some extend, but you may confuse runaway technical arguments (Rust in Linux?) with spitting vitriol over somebody.

>Posting it in this sprawling, mean form was dumb.

Thank you for putting my thoughts in words I can never string together so well.

I too would just stash the letter in my ZFS dropbox and never let it see the light of day again.

The letter reads like a husband who was just served a divorce notice from his wife. The man is angry, and wants everyone to know that he is not angry, and he is very much not bothered by the whole affair even though he has misgivings since the first day of marriage.

The letter would be much more convincing if it has any technical rebuttal against the decision.

  • And I see AI maximalists circling the wagon.

    • I'm as anti-AI as they come and I mostly think everyone involved in this is making their respective projects and ecosystems look worse for it here.

      Andrew was still way out of line in making many of the points included in this post, you don't have to be pro-AI to feel that way.