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Comment by lynaghk | Hacker News Reader

First, we should be clear that this is my goofy hobby keyboard project --- if I was concerned about safety, I'd have written it in MISRA C or something =D

There are many things about this project that a compiler can't help me with. I had to read about all of the pinouts from a PDF, draw them on a circuit board, and then map those pins in the firmware.

The code only deals with that last part, and in this particular example I decided that it was safer on the whole for the code to be obvious (easy to read + compare with hardware schematic) than to go through contortions with types to make some things more checkable by computer but less-checkable by human inspection.

The main risk here is not passing the wrong value to this match, it's fat fingering the transcription from the schematic.

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Makes sense, and I guess given the above your conclusion not to use Rust seems like the correct call for your situation. Thanks for explaining further. It's true you say much of this in the article.

Yeah I think people like to match the values of a programming language to ourselves as people. (And by values I mean, correctness, speed, expressiveness, velocity, etc). Like, I’ll pick the values which I like the most and find languages which match the values I aspire towards. Eg maybe I like the idea of my programs being strongly typechecked without sacrificing speed - so I program in rust. Then I write clean rust code even when I’m doing a quick and dirty prototype.

The better & harder approach matches a language’s virtues to the problem at hand. Strict correctness doesn’t matter much for a hobby program like this - moving fast and having fun are probably more important here. Expressing that with your tools might mean using Zig, or using rust but being sloppy with allocations and .clone() because it’s fine. Or treating rust like C and using unsafe everywhere. “Making invalid states inexpressible” isn’t that important in a fun side project - unless maybe that’s fun for you!

The right question isn’t “What is my favourite tool?”. It’s “If this project had a soul, how would it want to express itself through code?”

I like that last sentence; is it something you came up with yourself or is it a quote?

Thanks - that’s all me.

> The right question isn’t “What is my favourite tool?”. It’s “If this project had a soul, how would it want to express itself through code?”

I somewhat disagree. What you're saying is basically "pick the right tool for the job", but more poetically (not a criticism, BTW, I like your phrasing).

But what I think this is missing is that the "right" tool is at least in part based on your favorite tools are.

Or to put it differently, using a tool that may be suboptimal for the job, but which you know extremely well, may be better than using a tool you don't know which is optimal for the job.

Of course, this is much less of an issue for hobby projects, and if one of your goals for a project is "learn new stuff" (a goal I often have for my own hobby projects), then picking the optimal language may be exactly the right choice. You get to learn a new thing while not fighting with the language.

I had a think about this and I agree. There’s some tension here - you want breadth, but you don’t have enough time to get good at every language and framework. Maybe the right approach is to have familiar ground in each domain you find yourself. Pick enough languages and frameworks so you have trails in any terrain you want to tread with your work. You don’t need to be an expert in both php and rails, in both Java and C#, or both unity and unreal. But you want enough scope that if you want to throw together a quick and dirty UI prototype, you have familiar tooling you can call your own.

For me, when I want to make a quick UI prototype I reach for JS and Svelte. Because I’m comfortable there, its not worth it to also be an expert at rails, and Php and SwiftUI and C#/WPF. But if the only tool in my toolbox was Rust, or C, or Unity or something, I’d be much worse at prototyping user interfaces. The inverse is also true - if I wanted to write a database but only knew JS, I’d be in for a rough time. You want a home base in each domain.

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