The article on Odin was well liked (aside from an weird accusation that it was AI-written). The Zig article was “well written but we hated it”. It’s a weird dynamic. It failed to get any traction because it was negative, but the negative part was genuine feedback on the beginner experience.

Improving these pain points would make it more easy to get into, but since criticism isn’t interesting for people to hear, the feedback has problems penetrating. (On the other hand, people love criticism if it’s a the current thing in vogue to dislike)

One commenter said:

I also think you didn’t show enough data for some of your conclusions and didn’t highlight enough of the pros of the language while focusing on the cons.

I will say it’s is hard to figure out what the pros of Zig are when the feedback on the article consisted of downvotes without comments. But that’s Reddit for you.

The same commenter later quipped:

I think you should try out the language before writing an article, tbh

I think this really brings home the problem in the attitude of Zig towards beginners: you’re supposed to dive into the language and weather the pain of learning the language in depth, not until then will you understand the excellence of the language.

The pain I described of having to learn how build.zig works while still a beginner at Zig is therefore no problem, because the opinions of beginners doesn’t matter.

I am constantly reminded of how different this is from most other languages that actually try to be beginner friendly as well.