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Comment by emodendroket | Hacker News Reader

The problem is small and medium programs have a tendency to metastasize into large ones.

There's a controlled way of doing that. Prototype in python, as soon as it's clear what/how things need to be done, implement in C++, add python bindings for manual testing, unit-tests to solidify things.

The bindings will end up being throw-away code, with https://pybind11.readthedocs.io that's not too bad in terms of time spent.

Hopefully you would implement new, greenfield projects in Rust or perhaps Go, not C++. There's also a side-benefit in that Rust interoperates more easily with Python and similar languages, due to its features being a closer match to the C ABI.

Rust still needs to do a lot to catch up with 30 years of tooling and libraries.

And since we are speaking about Python integrations, Rust is still at the departure line to anything GPGPU related, even something like .NET has better tooling currently.

A modern C++ is head and shoulders above Rust. Rust might get there in a decade or two; not today.

Go is a complete joke if it wasn't so sad. Just no.

Sure, but isn't any code hygiene a matter of discipline, in this case switching over before it gets out of hand? The only reason my small programs are in Python and not in BASH is because of the same discipline. Also, being in a post-monolith era I hope this is all less of an issue.

In my opinion, there is always a lot of pressure that keeps people from maintaining good discipline, so there's a lot of value in tying your hands up-front in a way that ensures a bare minimum of maintainability.

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