Programmer Humor

Yeah, but that makes it sound like they're all equal, and there hasn't been any progression, which is untrue. You're either insane or a historical reenactor if you write something new in COBOL.

I think Rust is genuinely a huge leap forwards compared to C/C++. Maybe one day it will be shitty and obsolete, and at the very least it will become a boring standard option, but for now...

[warning: "annoying Rust guy" comment incoming]

I don't think Rust is perfect, but arguably I do "idolize" it, because I genuinely think it's notably better both in design and in practice than every other language I've used. This includes:

• C
• C++
• Java
• C#
• Kotlin
• Scala
• Python
• Ruby
• JavaScript (...I've barely used this, but I doubt my opinion would change on this one)
• Perl
• Go
• Bash (...look, I've had to write actual nontrivial scripts with loops and functions, so yes, Bash is a real language; it just sucks)
• Tcl/Tk (if you don't know, don't ask)
• CommonLisp (...again, I've barely used this, and I wish I had more experience with this and other Lisps)

In a literal sense, I agree that all (practical) languages "are flawed." And there are things I appreciate about all of the above languages (...except Tcl/Tk), even if I don't "like" the language overall. But I sincerely believe that statements like "all languages are flawed" and "use the best tool for the job" tend to imply that all (modern, mainstream) languages are equally flawed, just in different ways, which is absolutely not true. And in particular, it used to be true that all languages made tradeoffs between a fairly static, global set of binary criteria:

• safety/correctness versus "power" (i.e. low-level system control)
• safety/correctness versus run-time efficiency (both parallelism and high single-thread performance)
• ease-of-use/ease-of-learning versus "power" and runtime-efficiency
• implementation simplicity versus feature-richness
• build-time versus run-time efficiency
• type-safety versus runtime flexibility

Looking at these, it's pretty easy to see where most of the languages in my list above fall on each side of each of these criteria. What's special about Rust is that the core language design prevents a relatively novel set of tradeoffs, allowing it to choose "both" for the first two criteria (though certainly not the latter three; the "ease-of-use" one is debatable) at the expense of higher implementation complexity and a steeper learning curve.

The great thing about this isn't that Rust has "solved" the problem of language tradeoffs. It's that Rust has broadened the space of available tradeoffs. The assumption that safety necessarily comes at a runtime cost was so pervasive prior to Rust that some engineers still believe it. But now, Rust has proven, empirically, that this is not the case! And so my ultimate hope for Rust isn't that it becomes ubiquitous; it's that it inspires even better languages, or at least, more languages that use concepts Rust has brought to the mainstream (such as sum-types) as a means to explore new design tradeoff spaces. (The standard example here is a language with a lightweight garbage-collecting runtime that also has traits, sum-types, and correct-by-default parallelism.)

There are other languages that, based on what I know about them, might inspire the same type of enthusiasm if I were to actually use them more:

• Erlang
• Gleam
• OCaml
• Swift

...but, with the exception of Swift, these are all effectively "niche" languages. One notable thing about Rust is that its adoption has actually been rather astounding, by systems language standards. (Note that D and Ada never even got close to Rust's popularity.)

Have you actually ever seen an example of such an annoying rust dev? Cause I haven't, only a ton of people who see rust as their enemy number 1 because of such people. Those who are "annoyed" are way more annoying…

I just villainize languages. C++ is the devil.

Leaked Windows code made Wine and ReactOS devs anxious, since MS could sue over it. On the other hand, I've looked up the keycodes from the Linux kernel for X11 (it's literally just PS/2 with the unused codes being used in place of the E0 keys), and they haven't yet came after us.

Hey I'm both an annoying Rust user and I also don't understand the borrow checker. I just put & and * in front of things until it works.

Speaking as an annoying Rust user, you're being bigoted. I'm annoying, but the vast majority of Rust users are normal people who you wouldn't even know are using Rust.

Don't lump all the others in with me, they don't deserve that.

While the borrow checker has its downsides, so its legitimate uses. A few people in the D community were thinking about implementing it as a library.

Agreed, crab that anti-foss activist in particular

Huh weird, these pull requests just magically accepted themselves

Some of these people are Javascript web developers idealizing system development and the C language.

What is this abi and standard calling methods you speak off? Are you a rust-non-believer or some shit! Rewrite it all in rust, no questions asked!

( i too like the ideas of rust, but without a decent abi or not constantly changing interface, its useless to me. I dont want to rebuild all code, including libraries every time i update 1 library in my application )

TIL about this problem.