i am glad people are enjoying the strictly evaluated haskell dialect with affine and linear types
but like you have to admit at some point that rust programs take longer to write and longer to build than most of it's contemporaries, and that the up front costs, and high maintenance costs preclude it from being a viable choice for many
@tef I get where you're going with that analogy, but yeah, it's ripe for nitpicking.
A better one might be that Rust reminds you of building an airplane, period.
Building an airplane means that you have to do everything in the engineering, supply chain, building, testing, maintenance, and operations right; otherwise planes will fall out of the sky and people will die.
You really, really have to do every one of the best engineering practices by the book, and it's long, tedious, and expensive.
@tef@unlambda that's not what the black box analogy means though?
it's not possible to build the plane out of the black box, period. the physics doesn't work out. it's not a question of engineering, it's a question of how reality works
@whitequark@unlambda the point of the analogy is that people do not understand the engineering tradeoffs involved and that pushing for one goal over others will never reach practical results
my point is that people saying "write the whole thing in rust" is the same issue
but yeah the one person who does write black boxes has to chip in huh
@tef@whitequark@unlambda Don’t ask me why I’m not agitating to rewrite the whole autonomous driving software at $EMPLOYER in Rust instead of C++. (I’m a manager in the core robot software engineering organization, so I have a real voice in that choice.)
Don’t ask, because I just don’t have time to explain real software engineering to people who don’t care to learn it.
@whitequark@tef@unlambda It doesn’t require much ego to recognize that you’re not going to replace millions of lines of C++ that required thousands of people to write and billions of dollars to test with anything you and anyone you could recruit to join you would write in Rust over the next few months.
I’d give almost anything to be working in Rust on this stuff, but it’s just not remotely feasible, and it’s pretty damned tiresome to be told that it would be simple as pie if I weren’t such an egotistical idiot standing in the way of progress. But thanks anyway.
@janxdevil@tef@unlambda I've argued against rewriting much smaller codebases in Rust enough times. I just didn't feel others so beneath me to justify it with "you don't understand real software engineering".
@whitequark@tef@unlambda Not you. I have followed you long enough to know that’s not you. But I do, from time to time, encounter people who have never worked in a large software project, and who want to argue with me over why the choice to write the logic for the nine ton robot that can go 70 mph and drives on streets where lots of pedestrians are present is written in C++ instead of Rust (or whatever other new hotness they prefer) was a bad choice, and I’m a bad person for not resisting it more, and I just don’t have the time to hold their hand through all that. The recruiters screen most of them out before they ever get to me, but sometimes I find them in the social mix. Guys (they are always guys), do you understand the sheer volume of logic and the level of testing burden you’re talking about? This is not your hobby open source project.
@tef@unlambda i also don't think that i'm doing anything particularly special, and an important goal of mine is to desacralize the sort of work i'm doing
i think i'm doing okay on that; seeing a chemical engineer be able to implement SEM gateware, driver, and software without systems programming experience was blissful
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