I'm tempted to call the MoZ a failure, but even though I didn't successfully create any new programs, I learned a few things and learning is always a valid outcome.
The main thing I learned was: I don't like writing programs in Zig. I really want to support the Zig developers stance against AI contributions to the language, and maybe I should send them a few bucks, but compared to other languages I work in I just didn't find Zig to be very much fun.
I tried to chalk that up to familiarity but that didn't compute when compared to other languages I came to completely green (Go, Forth, etc.) and still enjoyed working with. I'm still basically hopeless at Forth but every time I have a chance to play with it, I have a good time.
This isn't Zig's problem. I'm sure some people love it for the same reasons some people hate the languages I enjoy working in. It's essentially a matter of taste, and outside of professional environments that's a fine reason to make a language choice.
It's a bummer because there are things I conceptually like about the way Zig works, and I was especially stoked about built-in SIMD support, but that excitement wasn't enough to overcome the drag of how it feels to me to work with it.
I stayed the course pretty well the first couple weeks of June, but after about the third week I found it very hard to invest an hour a day in the language. I still did it, but I spent more and more time sifting through unofficial documentation and such to figure out why things didn't work the way they were explained in the various guides I was following. I will admit that I had a number of unpleasant interactions with existing Zig programmers which didn't help.
On the upside I learned a lot about what I *do* like in a programming language and especially the impact the people who use the language have on someone interested in learning how to use it.
I look forward to applying all of this to my own projects going forward.
So while I'm not planning to port any of my projects to Zig, and probably won't start any new projects in it anytime soon, the exercise was very worthwhile and gave me a lot of ideas about what I want to do next and especially *how* I want to do it.
Jason J. Gullickson, 2026