Andrew Kelley, inventor and BDFL (benevolent dictator for life) of the Zig programming language, was interviewed by Vitaly Bragilevsky, head of the Rust ecosystem at tool vendor JetBrains. Zig is a general-purpose language that aims to be as performant as C but with "fewer footguns," in Kelley's words. It is a niche language, at 82 on the latest RedMonk Programming Language Rankings, but well-liked by its users; last year's Stack Overflow survey has Zig as the fourth most admired language, defined as Zig developers who want to continue using the language. We found the interview disjointed, perhaps because of the way it was edited, but nevertheless it touches on many of the key questions developers face today, including AI, GitHub reliability problems, and programming language choices. Kelley describes why he created Zig, when other options including C, C++, Rust, and Go already exist. He said he set out to develop a digital audio workstation.…