"Don't like it? Just fork it!" is a variant I see a lot in the FOSS world. It's equally pernicious in my view. Either you end up maintaining your own fork that nobody uses (and who wants to do that) or the fork is successful and half the community starts hating you for causing more fragmentation. Perhaps the most recent example of this I can think of is neovim, though in the language world python 2 vs 3 is so infamous that people have started hating the entire community from the outside.
All of this says to me that Zig is taking the wrong approach. Making highly controversial, opinionated features the standard with no way to opt out just leads to these endless debates. Languages (or any tools, for that matter) that stay out of the debate and just give everyone a flag tend to have much more welcoming communities.
I agree with a lot of this, in terms of the polarization and tribalism, which is often the result. Unfortunately, there is little that can be usually done, except use other programming languages (which are more agreeable) or fork/make your own.
Yeah, it's just really frustrating when a language like Zig comes along. It does so many things right and seems to have a really good philosophy. But then it includes some highly opinionated "features" that make it a non-starter for so many people who could otherwise benefit from it.
Yea, I was under the assumption there are literally thousands of programming languages and you can fork most of them when I replied.
I’m not usually a “just don’t use it” kind of guy, but in this case it’s valid, imo.
On the other hand in case cloud services like those provided Google/FB/Twitter/Cloudflare etc it is much more difficult to just go with "Don't use if you don't like" because not only there are not much alternative but also because sometimes Cloud service providers act in unison. So if one is pushed out from a service they are likely to be pushed from all other services too.