tw102

I think you're right. This essay, like so many of PG's, has the exact hallmarks of a smart person thinking for themselves about a topic.

If you "think for yourself" when confronted with a problem like this (a problem at least three millennia old! People have been arguing about effective writing for a long time), you'll inevitably retrace some steps—good steps—of smart thinkers that have gone before you. But you won't be able to think deeply! PG, like some many smart people who embark on criticism, don't imagine the responses-to-their-response (which are, historically, also by clever and independent thinkers), and the third order responses, and so on.

This essay is shallow because it has no reference to, and no argument against, the generations of writers who thought "perhaps complexity or even obscurity has an essential and unavoidable place in our writing" and wrote persuasively to advocate for the need complexity in writing.

This (like so many of PG's essays about things that aren't programming), is armchair philosophy about a contentious and deep topic that doesn't consider the very real problems of writing. PG (by virtue of his position) doesn't have to, and therefore cannot, steelman his arguments. While you're right that this essay isn't in any way "dumb", unfortunately the comment you're responding to was right! This is pseudo-intellectualism.

This is exactly what the article describes. Lint ERRORs that block CI but not compilation.

Unfortunately malloc-free is unavoidable if you're writing code that needs to allocate memory rather carefully (e.g. guaranteeing no OOMs—Rust has many situations where it'll silently heap alloc and then panic on OOM). Looks like Zig has accepted that it'll be used for those situations and decided to make that experience really good, instead of deciding to be a rustalike or insist on RAII. I think that's an appropriate choice! It makes me excited to use C less.

there are plenty of people who, e.g.

- don't want to show their face on the internet

- people whose appearance is ambiguously gendered

- people who are not the gender that people assume from pictures of them

- people who used to be addressed as a different gender

and, when addressed, want to be referred to correctly.

for instance, i'll never show my face on the internet, but i like it better when someone says "_he_ wrote that program" rather than "_she_ wrote that program."

for all those people, it makes sense to put their pronouns in their bio.

but that leaves the problem: if only the people in the above categories put pronouns in their bio, and you have pronouns in your bio, that might imply you are, for instance, ambiguously gendered.

so people who are conventionally masculine like Rich put pronouns in their bio to normalize it, and to make sure that "having pronouns in one's bio" is not a "thing only OTHER people do".

i think it's a good thing to do. i'll do it too.

I'm asking because I'm genuinely interested: does a very well-designed globe help in building trust to put you solidly in the middle of a business' revenue? Error messages are not gimmicks at all; but does a correct mapping of dots on to a sphere help you write the excellent docs that Stripe is known for?

(the developers did an incredible job on that infographic and it's great)