I know a lot of people don't like overloading in general because they've been bitten by people abusing it, but I don't think that's where Zig is coming from. Rather, the project places a high value on being able to understand a snippet of code in isolation, particularly the performance implications of that snippet.

Especially in math-heavy domains I don't think anyone is arguing that "vec1.mul(vec2.plus(vec3))" is cleaner code in the abstract (and I know I've personally written pre-processors _entirely_ to avoid having to write that kind of garbage when doing math-heavy code in an environment unfriendly to such syntax), but the function calls make it crystal clear that something non-trivial is happening under the hood.

Do I want to to give up operator overloading in Python? Absolutely not, and to be frank I wish that portion of the language were even more dynamic. Do I care about Zig not having operator overloading? Not in the slightest. It sits at a different point in the language design space, and I'm super excited about it.