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by sarreph·1mo ago·view on hn ↗
It's hard, in my opinion, to lend credence to the author here when they decided to devote the first and largest section of their article to an incisive display of speculative ad hominem.

Would have been a great opportunity to outline the benefits of Zig! I've been keen to pick Zig up recently due to mitchellh's evangelism and inspiring writing on the subject.

This article puts me off learning Zig.

3 comments
> first and largest section of their article to an incisive display of speculative ad hominem.

Seems you're not alone in feeling this, mind quoting the exact and verbatim parts that seem like "speculative ad hominem"? I see there are quite a bits about how Andrew sees Jarred and his workflow/work mentality, but I'm not sure I see clearly what is supposed to be the ad hominem, speculative or not.

Sure:

> he was essentially groomed from a young age

> It's one thing to choose a poor work-life balance for oneself; a different thing entirely to demand it of others

> Jarred was a stinky manager

The second thing is not an ad hominem, it's talking about what he did or how he did it, not who he is.
Casting aspersions without proof, even if it's something everyone knows, is in poor taste and ad hominem. I've never heard a bad word about Jaredd before, so Andrew seems more like a stinky person to me right now.
There are two direct quotes in the article. The first is from Jaredd saying he works 90 hour weeks. The second is from Jaredd/his new company saying if you care about work/life balance, don’t work at this new company. So that’s definitely not an ad hominem.

The other stuff maybe, I’m not familiar enough.

There's a direct quote in the article from Jaredd talking about poor work/life balance
“An Ad hominem refers to when a speaker attacks the character, motive, or some other attribute of the person making an argument rather than the substance of the argument itself”

It’s definitionally an ad hominem against Jared. If he stuck to why he thought it was bad for Bun to do this, I would be more sympathetic.

> stuck to why he thought it was bad for Bun to do this

Quite the opposite. "When Jarred announced the Rust rewrite, we were ecstatic."

> It’s definitionally an ad hominem against Jared.

Who Jarred is, as a CEO, definitely has an impact on how the company develops software - how Zig is used. And the argument is that Zig is used badly in Bun. Without that context, I, as a reader, would have to actually read through a lot of code to be convinced of that point.

The author being the author of zig…
> Would have been a great opportunity to outline the benefits of Zig!

Eh, Google and ChatGPT both exist?