@RL_Dane eventually, I hope. but C++ just contains decades of investment in the ecosystem, and with boost and other major libraries you can go from relative zero to putting the pieces of a relatively large system together extremely fast. And that's of course how C++ becomes a nightmare, but it works and satisfies investors.
But it does seem like software's heyday is up, and Rust projects certainly aren't raking in the investment the way the C++ world was in țhe late 90s/early 00s
I think the paradigm is pretty distant from Python and more traditional languages. I think someone comfortable with #Haskell may be more comfortable with #Rust, but I've already said more than I know ;)
@RL_Dane I was a #Java fanboy with 1.1, a #Python fanboy with Version 2.x and now the same with #Rust. So I can't say anything from an outside perspective.
What I don't understand is why anyone needs to hate a language. I simply don't write programs in those.
I think the negative reactions are against the rust hype, rather than the language itself, but I'm speaking as someone who isn't particularly familiar with the language itself, nor its community, so I have no judgements about it along those lines.
@RL_Dane@MadMike77 a lot of negative reactions to rust I see, are C and C++ programmers convinced they are genius programmers who don't need no rust ta avoid creating CVEs. And that's kinda concerning.
@RL_Dane Because you either don't understand it, it scares you by all that syntactic garbage, or you understand it's beauty despite all those syntactic obstacles :)
You know, I tried to grow a beard a couple years back.
My aunt said I looked like Ted Cruz and I'm pretty sure my electric razor hit Mach 2 going across my face ;)
@RL_Dane I pretty much have that "Yeah, Rust is ok, but I like Haskell better because a few reasons" attitude. But I prefer on why I like Haskell as opposed to why I'm meh about Rust. Those reasons including the garbage collector, & a certain elegance I appreciate.
But if my choices were between C, C++, & Rust I'd take Rust any day! It's got a lot of similar features...
@RL_Dane i thought this was an interesting writeup on nim. it talks a little about why the author chose it over rust (and some other languages). https://forum.nim-lang.org/t/9655
@RL_Dane I don't think I would be so hype about Rust if other languages actually had borrow checking, right now Rust is the only one really trying to make it work
@RL_Dane Not really. Very simplified explanation: borrow checking is a compile-time feature to detect if you used a pointer after the pointed-to value went out of scope, or detect if you hold more than one mutable pointer to a single value at once.
#ELI5, with "5" meaning, "I grew up on BASIC and Pascal, did a ton of ksh/bash, am ok-ish at Perl, and at least know how to say hello in Python, but never got very far into serious programming." 😁
@alcinnz@RL_Dane I think that is not true for most popular GC languages, i.e. languages like Java and Go move all the performance overhead to run-time, not compile-time.
@RL_Dane@jf The (partial) move GC burden onto developers as opposed to the computer.
I think it boils down to some devs coming to Rust saying "wow, this is better than a language like C or C++ which lack a GC", whilst others come saying "wow, this is more frustrating than languages like Java or Python which have GC".
i came to Rust from Python (statically typechecked python with Pyright) and my thought was "wow this is much less annoying than trying to type python and i still get fancy high level features"
@RL_Dane Hell, my personal opposition to Rust only exists because of the cult.
I, for one, have no real basis to have a strong opinion on Rust. It seems like it might have good ideas, but it uses LLVM so it's not worth looking into. The centralized package management is a mistake, IMO; Go got the package management model pretty much right.
Saying "I prefer C" has attracted negative attention (and moral judgements!).
My opposition to Rust is entirely a result of the insane undeserved hype.
@RL_Dane ....well, actually, there was also a great deal of hatred when Rust first infected the Linux ecosystem to the point where I had to choose between uninstalling software I liked, or spend literal hours of extra time waiting for them to build.
Dang, and it seems to be poised to overtake gcc (corpos love those permissive licenses!)
I didn't know it was that bloated.
Reminds me of a little flyer I saw in my aunt's office in the 90s. It was praising UNIX over OS390 (now z/OS) because while OS390 was bloated with "millions" of lines of code, UNIX was lightweight & nimble with merely a few hundred thousands of SLOC.
Ha. I'm waiting for the day when a text editor weights in at a million SLOC.
I wonder what vim is up to. ;)
@RL_Dane I'd argue a lot of them basically do, if we're doing a comparison to UNIX and OS390.
VS Code uses Electron. Helix is written in Rust, which depends on LLVM, and thus it's impossible to build Helix from a full-source bootstrap without tens of millions of SLOC.
An equivalent comparison for Vim using GCC would probably be only slightly better; Vim built with, say, kencc [there is a port!] would... actually, I dunno how big Vim's source is, but approximately that big.
@pixelherodev@RL_Dane You made an important point. The centralization of the package management is a big mistake. I don't hate rust but I don't like anything the centralization.
@RL_Dane Those most polarized are often the loudest? I dunno, I feel like many of the folks I work with directly these days are about using the right tool for the job no matter what it is. I feel like there really is too much out there to obstinately try and write everything in the same language.
@RL_Dane I'm sure they're out there, but just aren't the type to talk about it. Similar to how reviews online often skew toward 5 stars or 1 star. People with a "meh" opinion aren't likely to spend a lot of time talking about it.
@aja@RL_Dane@jbowen I hate to do a drive by comment that seems critical but I have to say I have always HATED that article. Graham has a tendency to be 50% very insightful and 50% profoundly wrong.
Note that more or less NONE of the y-com startups use lisp, and if the claims in that article are true about development speed yada yada you'd think he'd be interested in that...
I'ts more like, he likes lisp, he used it, he assumed some things, he wrote about those things.
This is sort of an aside from the language conversation and more a 'PG is not a reliable narrator' comment :) lisp is very cool, rust seems very cool. But yeah, that article, not a fan.
Sure. I mean, if bash didn't have very obvious limitations, I guess I could be a bash fanboi and say that it's all you'd ever need or whatnot -- because it's what I'm most familiar with, and it's what my bash-molded mind finds most intuitive. ;)
Not a serious programmer disclaimer aside, bash's insistence that nearly everything is a string has some cool advantages and flexibilities, but freedom like that is so much rope to hang yourself with once you cross the thousand SLOC threshold, methink. ;)
I wonder if I would like TCL. People seem to run screaming for the hills whenever it's mentioned, but it takes that very paradigm to its apotheosis (and possibly to the brink of madness XD )
Not a Perl expert, although I've enjoyed using it.
I think it's less string-oriented than bash/shell. While it only has a couple of hard types ($scalar, @array, and maybe some pointers and stuff), I believe it has soft internal types like int/float/string that get handled seamlessly.
In shell, everything is a string until you force it to be used otherwise. Not sure, but I think TCL is very similar, yet is used for larger apps.
@jbowen@RL_Dane@aja don't get me wrong, I think lisp has a lot of interesting properties, but also a LOT of this stuff has been noticed by other programming languages and features like first-class/higher level functions, powerful macro systems, etc. have been ported.
Of course you can't match the code as data/data as code levels of lisp given its structure but it also has downsides.
But still a highly admirable language, just not the magical be-all and end-all of programming.
The wise person realises that there is no such language.
And as for the rust fanboyisms, and I speak as somebody who, from the outside in, admires the aims and apparent successes of the language and wants to learn (when there is time...), it just strikes me as absolutely typical new language hype. I saw it with go and even js, yes js, with node's emergence, and python and for a while ruby... just part of the life cycle :)
I kinda loathe how much the modern web (i.e. bloated crap hellware) and mobile (i.e. spyware-as-a-service) have overtaken all rational forms of development.
@RL_Dane@jbowen@aja yes it's awful, electron is a scourge. And I understand why people do it, but it doesn't make me like it any more.
As far as I'm concerned I'm only interested in kernel/systems development. I've worked at every level in the stack, from crappy internal .net software to web to middleware stuff to systems, to kernel and even chatting to hardware guys.
That's awesome, and I'm really glad that you're giving your attention to the kernel.
I kinda wish that same level of attention-to-detail could be given to desktop apps, but then of course, we'd probably have a lot fewer desktop apps. ;)
@RL_Dane@jbowen@aja apple do a lot for that I feel, pushing people towards native and making a LOT of tooling to do that and a pretty UI that isn't web-based.
Other big tech companies have gone all-in on using a massively legacy document layout engine for apps and it's just sigh. Plus CSS, a good idea but in actual use the worst thing to deal with ever invented.
Yeah, I've noticed that MacOS tends to get a lot more native apps than Linux or maybe even Windows does.
Case in point, the excellent (mostly?) FOSS cross-platform app #Simplenote has a web interface, an electron app for every platform that runs on, and an amazingly good MacOS app (wish I confess I do miss).
Fortunately, there's the excellent python-based sncli which lets me edit my Simplnotes in nvim. Huzzah
@RL_Dane@ljs@jbowen Luxury! I actually had to use ed on a DECWriter (ok, technically that was MTS, not Unix. When we got some Unix stations a couple of years later, they had vi.) #unix#mts
@RL_Dane@jbowen
If you make 145 line additions and 129 line removals in one of your core algorithms of 313 lines and all your ~50 tests pass on the first try you just fall in #love with #Rust. It's inevitable at that point. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
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