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Comment by t8sr | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 :)

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