Generally speaking I think it is the right trade off for now. Purely inferring from Andrew and the Zig's team online character as I don't know them in person, I think they do care a lot of DX, things like compiling speed and tools. So I think once 1.0 come I won't be surprised if it will have extremely good documentation as well.
And I would argue, writing good, simple, clear, detailed documentation is actually harder than writing code itself.
That said, others have pointed out that writing documentation and tests helps improve quality quite a bit, and in this case it would also increase usability. I think I'd agree with this stance, but there is no way I could make the statement that even most of the code I've written for public consumption had excellent documentation or examples. So I've got no leg to stand on there, just the armchair.
> And I would argue, writing good, simple, clear, detailed documentation is actually harder than writing code itself.
All the more reason why it must be done! A little silly but from my armchair maybe it's one of those "start with the interface you want and work backwards", but the problem is that approach can be at odds with mechanical sympathy and we know which side Zig lands on (and arguably should land on based on it's values).
If so, I believe Zig will stay within a niche. Lower entry barriers allow "script kiddies" to easily start withe language, and they eventually will become leading engineers. Only a few people tend to go straight for the highest practice without "playing around". IMHO the reason, why PHP got so popular (it was not good back then, just very very easy to start with).
Yes.
I think a contributor that really wanted to help the ecosystem would start in the stdlib and then start moving outwards. Even if it was LLM-assisted, I think it could be high value.
IIRC Loris already has an engine for building websites with Zig, but making sure that every Zig library has docs (similar to rustdocs) might be a great start. It is incredibly useful to have a resource like rustdocs, both the tooling and the web sites that are easily browsable.
Again, maybe everyone in the Zig ecosystem just has amazing editor setups and massive brains, but I personally really like the ease of browsing rustdoc.
> If so, I believe Zig will stay within a niche. Lower entry barriers allow "script kiddies" to easily start withe language, and they eventually will become leading engineers. Only a few people tend to go straight for the highest practice without "playing around". IMHO the reason, why PHP got so popular (it was not good back then, just very very easy to start with).
I agree, but I'd add that the niche they're aiming for is systems programming, so they're probably fine :). The average hacker there is expecting C/C++ or to be near the metal, and I think Zig is a great fit there. They're likely not going to convince people who write Ruby, but it feels reasonable for C hackers.
Also I want to just be clear that I think Zig has a lot of motivating factors! They're doing amazing things like zig cc, unbelievably easy, "can't believe it's not butter" cross-compilation, their new explicit/managed I/O mechanism, explicit allocators as a default, comptime, better type ergonomics. It's a pretty impressive language.