Re:Game Jam 2 Results
by littlestymaar on Tuesday September 13, 2022 @10:11AM
(#32824514)
You've got this funny habit to quote super tiny excerpt from my sentences, and reacting to things very loosely related to what I actually wrote. Why bother with the quotes then?
> Zig does make sound guarantees of spatial memory safety
Mr Walton gave an insightful overview of the many caveats that comes with this statements.
> two languages are as expressive if there aren't programs in one that require more lines in the other than by a constant factor
This is a very concise way of describing explicitness, I like it.
> Don't try to build statistics on a small sample. Not only is the argument bad, but it can just as easily be turned against you. […] Second, you're trying to draw a trend out of tiny samples again; this never ends well.
The famous “statistics” tropes… you know, getting a massive amount of data point and making regressions on top is not the only way to produce knowledge. Once again, epistemology classes for all are sorely needed… Fortunately, the parachutes inventors didn't wait for the numbers to get big enough before handing them to paratroopers ;).
> Also, the number of low-level languages designed after 1985
Yes, but I already answered to this argument: this has nothing to do with low-level here, in that particular case Zig is trying to replace JavaScript, which means it's fair to compare it to JavaScript and other languages.
> I don't understand your complaint. First, I hope you're not claiming that programs written in Rust don't have very serious bugs, just as bad as segfaults.
No, this paragraph is part of the sub-discussion about the statement “Zig has a pretty good memory safety story”, it doesn't involve Rust in any ways.
> You're a step away from saying, 100% of commercial Zig programs crash, <100% commercial C programs crash, therefore it's better not to have spatial memory safety. It's like talking about a person who dies from some illness
I have another analogy for you: it's like talking about someone who's just eaten an unknown mushroom and is now dying. I can't be sure that it's the mushroom that's killing him (and the standard scientific procedure to be sure about that doesn't involve giving the said mushroom to 100 person just to get a big enough sample set), but we been told not to eat random mushrooms and “it's not the mushroom fault” is not the most reasonable answer at that point, even though the sample is “just 1”. But hey, I can wait until more people it that mushrooms so I can have more data point, I'll keep counting.
> Moreover, I think Rust made the same big mistake C++ did: trying to get a low-level language to look like a high-level one on the page (so-called "zero-cost abstractions"). I think that design philosophy has little pros and too many cons.
This is the main issue in fact. You don't like the language (which is fine) because it takes too much inspiration from C++, but then you're trying to give rational argument of why “it's not that good”. And that's why your argument aren't compelling, and so hand-wavy for the first few thousand words.
In fact there are quite a few people here on HN who've picked Zig as the “herald of the fight against rust dominance” because they where offended by the Rust Evangelism Strikeforce, like what happened with Nim earlier (a decade-old language that interestingly enough had a popularity boost on HN as an alternative to Rust when Rust's influence grew, before disappearing into oblivion when the next champion (Zig) rose).
As a side note it's actually interesting to see how Mr Walton has evolved over the year as a reaction to the “we need a champion against Rust” crowd: he went from “Rust is nice, you should try it” to straight “stop advocating memory-unsafe languages just because you don't like Rust for heaven's sake”.
> Zig does make sound guarantees of spatial memory safety
Mr Walton gave an insightful overview of the many caveats that comes with this statements.
> two languages are as expressive if there aren't programs in one that require more lines in the other than by a constant factor
This is a very concise way of describing explicitness, I like it.
> Don't try to build statistics on a small sample. Not only is the argument bad, but it can just as easily be turned against you. […] Second, you're trying to draw a trend out of tiny samples again; this never ends well.
The famous “statistics” tropes… you know, getting a massive amount of data point and making regressions on top is not the only way to produce knowledge. Once again, epistemology classes for all are sorely needed… Fortunately, the parachutes inventors didn't wait for the numbers to get big enough before handing them to paratroopers ;).
> Also, the number of low-level languages designed after 1985
Yes, but I already answered to this argument: this has nothing to do with low-level here, in that particular case Zig is trying to replace JavaScript, which means it's fair to compare it to JavaScript and other languages.
> I don't understand your complaint. First, I hope you're not claiming that programs written in Rust don't have very serious bugs, just as bad as segfaults.
No, this paragraph is part of the sub-discussion about the statement “Zig has a pretty good memory safety story”, it doesn't involve Rust in any ways.
> You're a step away from saying, 100% of commercial Zig programs crash, <100% commercial C programs crash, therefore it's better not to have spatial memory safety. It's like talking about a person who dies from some illness
I have another analogy for you: it's like talking about someone who's just eaten an unknown mushroom and is now dying. I can't be sure that it's the mushroom that's killing him (and the standard scientific procedure to be sure about that doesn't involve giving the said mushroom to 100 person just to get a big enough sample set), but we been told not to eat random mushrooms and “it's not the mushroom fault” is not the most reasonable answer at that point, even though the sample is “just 1”. But hey, I can wait until more people it that mushrooms so I can have more data point, I'll keep counting.
> Moreover, I think Rust made the same big mistake C++ did: trying to get a low-level language to look like a high-level one on the page (so-called "zero-cost abstractions"). I think that design philosophy has little pros and too many cons.
This is the main issue in fact. You don't like the language (which is fine) because it takes too much inspiration from C++, but then you're trying to give rational argument of why “it's not that good”. And that's why your argument aren't compelling, and so hand-wavy for the first few thousand words.
In fact there are quite a few people here on HN who've picked Zig as the “herald of the fight against rust dominance” because they where offended by the Rust Evangelism Strikeforce, like what happened with Nim earlier (a decade-old language that interestingly enough had a popularity boost on HN as an alternative to Rust when Rust's influence grew, before disappearing into oblivion when the next champion (Zig) rose).
As a side note it's actually interesting to see how Mr Walton has evolved over the year as a reaction to the “we need a champion against Rust” crowd: he went from “Rust is nice, you should try it” to straight “stop advocating memory-unsafe languages just because you don't like Rust for heaven's sake”.