Also see "On 'Safe' C++", which goes deeper into many of the insights brought up by this article. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42186475>
Having skimmed it, I hope more people read that article.
Several months later, I learned I had experienced slight brain damage due to hypoxia and I’ve been slowly recovering ever since. The worst part of all of this is that I said in that post that I was enjoying golang. In other words, I had brain damage and suddenly found writing Go to be fun. Take from that what you will
One example of this is [...] the new proposed (but not yet approved) Boost website. This is located at boost.io and I’m not going to turn that into a clickable link, and that’s because this proposed website brings with it a new logo. [...] This logo features a Nazi dog whistle. The Nazi SS lightning bolts.
The thing about dog whistles like this is that you can feign ignorance or act like someone is seeing something that isn’t there, but for something egregious it’s very hard to defend it in this case.
Of course, there’s other political dog whistles out there in the tech world right now. Justine Tunney named her C library, cosmopolitan5, which I personally believe is named after the term Rootless Cosmopolitan. This is a pejorative Soviet epithet which was used primarily during Joseph Stalin’s antisemitic campaign in the late 40s and early 50s. This is obviously much harder to prove6 as Justine has done a very good job of deleting some very eyebrow raising tweets over the years, even having them scrubbed from The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine [...]
Justine, unfortunately, doesn’t appear to have made any amends either, at least publicly, or even acknowledged her past behavior, though she is more than happy to reference her time in the Occupy Wall Street movement. These days however, she’s busy working on llamafiles for Mozilla. For those of you not in the know, a llamafile is basically for turning an LLM’s weights into an executable.
It's a massive post though. Right now I am an hour in and probably about 75% done and I am skipping most of the linked articles. Except for the Ender's game parts. I highly recommend those.
I read it.
To save people the trouble it seemed like a manic rant intended to pick several bones (at least the author is self aware enough to admit as much). It's heavy on the "trust me, I have sources" and light on actual content. It's got enough drama and insinuations from calling people liars, narcissists, to finally nazis. It veers from committee drama, to Trump, to feminism, to AI... very hard to follow.
Worthy of a daytime soap opera but other than that there's nothing notable there. Except it does make me want to avoid all these people, on both sides of whatever drama this is.
It has the tone you describe, but I think letting that lead you to avoid both sides as problematic is premature. Melodramatic rant doesn't mean wrong, and if the author is even just half right, there are things we as a community should rectify. Avoiding both sides is an issue if one side has far less power. To make a daring analogy, under the #MeToo banner there were certainly accusations that were false or played up, but many came from sincere people who were backed into a corner. When you hear such an accusation without sufficient evidence yet, the nature of the issue is such that you should be considerate of the underdog. Like it or not, taking a side can sometimes be the only reasonable position.
The C++ community can deal with it, I’m not part of it because I’ve been hearing stuff like this for a loooong time from both sides. I’m sure there’s a lot of truth to it. But in my experience either these situations get fixed early or they fester until a huge explosions (like metoo). Either way, all the drama is a far cry from the things I’m interested in - memory safety. If you can’t talk about that without wading through a sludge of toxic personalities, time is better spent elsewhere.
The JeanHeyd Meneide saga really says it all about what’s wrong with the C++ community. I would say their blog post is far more enlightening and avoids all the accusations and combative tone of the linked piece while still making clear what the problem is. And it’s technically enlightening to boot.