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Comment by t8sr | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, I don’t feel qualified to evaluate Rust. At face value, it seems like a good replacement for C++, but I’ve never successfully used it for anything larger than a toy. That’s probably mostly on me.

My comment was referring to the impression that people who like Rust seem to think that you either also accept Rust as the best thing ever, or you don’t get it. I probably shouldn’t have mentioned it, because now the thread will be about Rust.

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"people who like Rust seem to think that you either also accept Rust as the best thing ever, or you don’t get it"

I don't think Rust is in any way unique in having people who think that way...

It has got so many people from ruby and js crowds so there will be statistically more of them.

Probably not, but it's a question of degree. The projects I work on don't get monthly requests to drop everything and rewrite them in Haskell/Clojure/Go but we do get them for Rust.

An anecdote: I recently opened a position on my team, and got two applicants on the same day who ignored the project description, and basically said we should hire them to tell us how everything we do could be better if we rewrote multiple projects in Rust.

Of course it's completely possible for a programming language to be both (A) really well-designed and (B) have annoying people among its community. I suspect that's the case here.

Every language that has a reputation of some kind purity in one or more characteristics (Haskell, Lisp, Rust) is bound to attract some people that values purity over practicality.

It's not the case of the rust dev team, which seems very balanced. But I've met a few rust enthusiasts that match the worst of the fancy FP or Typing fan boys.

Those Haskell people do talk a lot about purity.

Of their precious bodily fluids?

Not sure why you're being downvoted. That is a brilliant reference to a brilliant movie.

I personally have language fatigue after playing with various languages over two decades.

The thing I hate about rust is abbreviated keywords like “fn” and “mut” because it sounds like fricken mutt. A function is a function not a fn, and is it really so hard to type “mutable”?

There’s more important things in life to worry about than rewriting codebases in language Z.

An old habit of mine: Avoid symbol-speaking or abbreviation-speaking. I verbalize "fn" as "function" and "mut" as "mutable" the same way I verbalize "std::unique_ptr" as "standard unique pointer" and not "stid unique pooter".

How would you verbalize "=>" ?

Edit: Fat arrow?

"fat arrow" would just be symbol-speaking. Assuming you are referring to the match syntax in rust[1], I verbalize "PATTERN => EXPRESSION" as "on $PATTERN, do $EXPRESSION".

I don't read code in English, even though I'm a native speaker. So its kindof a silly question: this would only come up when walking someone else through the code. I internally read code using data-flow and control-flow graphs. The written abbreviation is just shorthand for a specific type of graph vertex (or edge).

[1] https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch18-01-all-the-places-for-pa...

I was more thinking of C# where "=>" is the closest thing I can think of to "function".

There is Func<T> - that's a delegate type.

I verbalise that as "goes to". In the case of, say,

  things.Select(thing => thing.Stuff);

I verbalise the brackets as "thing goes to thing dot stuff".

“Goes to” is what Prof. Elsa Gunter teaches in the PL theory class at Illinois

Something like (x, y) => x + y can be verbalized as "lambda of x and y producing x plus y".

I never understood the push for terseness in newer languages. Are there any IDE's or text editors today that don't do code completion? Code coloring helps too. Usability is improved with full words imo...

I find it hard to believe any language would be so silly as to call functions "functions" in actual code. Fn or fun or gtfo.

Why not skip the keywords altogether and use an ACTUAL λ symbol. Funny thing we have UTF8 everywhere but no one uses it… People are still typing ASCII in markdown files, but there’s Unicode symbols to render tables and whatnot directly in a text editor… but here we are :)

RIIR is a thing. Also, the Rust Evangelism Strikeforce.

I love Rust, but I think it does go over the top, more so than other languages.

Sure, but I think I've heard far more about RIIR and the Rust Evangelism Strikeforce than I've actually seen it in action.

It definitely is a thing, but those people are spending their time being loud and annoying while other people are quietly releasing libraries and shipping products.

Also, give it a few years and the loud and annoying people will have moved on to being loud and annoying about something else.

So it goes.

It's true, Rust is just the most recent inductee into that clique. But it seems to work kind of like the Sith: there are never more than two that are really active at any one time.

Rust is not perfect and will never replace language like c# go or python. But it’s the first language that is a true replacement for c++ because it can do everything c++ can do but in a type-safe and thread-safe way.

It can't do exceptions or inheritance

It is more a C replacement

Is inheritance really that critical a language feature?

Rust also can't overload operator&& and lacks the "macro pre-processor" that was already a bad idea in the 1970s. Absence of specific footguns is not something people will mourn.

To the extent that you should have exceptions in your software, Rust's panic picks that slack up pretty well, and to the extent you should have error handling C++ exceptions were a bad idea and sum types like Result are much better.

Note that although Rust's types don't have inheritance the traits they can implement do. Which is much more likely to be something you actually wanted than say, C++ multiple inheritance.

It can do flow-through error handling and code reuse. Exceptions and inheritance are just two particular ways to achieve those goals.

The world runs (mostly) on C and C++. Those languages will be around, and continue to run the world, for a very very long time.

Well, those languages do tend to attract people who deal in absolutes...

"There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses." -- Bjarne Stroustrup

https://www.stroustrup.com/quotes.html#:~:text=%22There%20ar....

I have a very similar problem. Lisp is so compatible with the way I work, and I'm so productive in it, that I'd rather use it for everything -- even a simple Scheme implementation that lacks things like CL's condition system or "update all instances when a struct or class definition changes" magic. So I have a tendency to be very squarely within Smug Lisp Weenie territory when comparatively discussing PLs.

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