This post combines pretty much every technology I'm obsessed with right now: Python, Rust, Pandas, Numpy, and LLVM. Yess!!!
I can relate to this, it is not unreasonable for me.
I've noticed the younger people are the more likely they are to be passionate, which I put down mainly to not knowing any better. Once one has more of the experience that places you higher up where you can see further, suddenly one's own plot of land doesn't seem so special.
> dismissing people for being passionate is not
Seems I didn't say that well either. Passion that comes from knowledge and experience is good. If it comes from inexperience then maybe not so good because it isn't "Healthy discussion around facts" but around existing biases.
Edit: genuinely no offence intended.
As somebody who uses both, I don’t understand the whole territorial conflicts in this space. Any C programmer can learn a ton by the paradigm Rust uses. Even if Rust would fade into oblivion tomorrow, the lessons I learned by using it will remain valueable enough for me not to regret having learned it.
C is always going to be needed, given the size of the codebase and the amount of embedded stuff written in it. It comes – however – with a waggon full of dangerous traps and gotchas and in practise very few people are good enough to always avoid them or mitigate the risks created by them. I don’t see any reason why C shouldn’t get better in these areas for the benefit of everyone involved.
If you are a professional, you will use the most effective tool for the job - to get results. What tool will produce the best results - schedule, budget, quality, maintainability, scalabi, portability, etc.?
Other than outliers that will crush your productivity, or multiply it, your feelings are pretty irrelevant.
Similarly, when you get into a racecar, your feelings about your preferred driving style are irrelevant - if you can change the setup to accommodate your style without slowing jt down, great = but if not, your job is to adapt to the situation and reliably get the best possible result.
Either way, you have fun and produce a crap result, you will not be congratulated (or re-hired), and if you have little fun and produce a great result, you'll get both.
If it's a hobby, do whatever you want.
Obviously, in terms of professional development, you want to use more forward looking tools, but what is the best measure of that - your feelings or results?
I choose the best tools for me, invest a lot of time in getting better at them, and choose jobs I can do with minimal changes to my toolset.
To expand your analogy, if I have spent the last few years of my life getting better at driving bulldozers, I will not take any job requiring me to get into a racecar.
Old, boring, mature tools where the limitations are well understood.
This isn’t mutually exclusive, surely. If anything you’d expect it to be quite closely correlated.
I'm actually looking for a different job for that reason.
We are required to used Java on K8s, Kafka & Cassandra for every single solution big or small because it is fashionable, not because it gets the job done well or for any other reason. I can even demonstrate how a couple of Python scripts and Pandas could do all the same work with far less overhead and achieve the same results. Crickets. Python is not sexy where I am, it is the language of peasants, apparently. Not sure what to make of it all, but that is my reality right now.
Also, I don't think you know anything at all about driving race cars. The driver has a tremendous amount of input into the car's setup because it's his life on the line out on the track. "Adapting to the situation" gets finishes, not wins.
Good reason to seek a new situation, since you have neither appropriate tools selected for you nor input to select better ones.
Racecars? Yeah, I've only won some SCCA super-regional championships. Yes the driver does have a very large inptut into the setup, BUT it is within the constraint of the combination of the setup change and the improved driver feel must make the combination of car/driver faster. And yes, sometimes a change that makes the car technically a bit slower but gives the driver more confidence will result in faster net lap times -- and those are OK. But whatever the setup is, at the end of the test sessions, whether the car feels great or feels like crap, it's the driver's job to get the most out of it.
And I've had many situations both in the racecar and in international alpine ski racing where something felt weird/odd/unfamiliar/scary, but was fast as heck, so it was my job to adapt, rather than go back into my comfort zone.
Better to keep pushing outside your comfort zone, use tools/setups that get better results, and change your 'feel' to appreciate the better setup.
It’s really asking the same questions over and over again. Can we do better ? Does this tool allow me to be efficient, write safer and faster code, how good is the adjacent libraries and ecosystem ? What other kinds of things does it make it possible to solve?