Furthermore some programmers really like complicated languages like Rust, Haskell, etc others like straightforward languages like Go, Python, etc.
Python is absolutely not straighforward, it's a huge language with many moving parts and gotchas.
Although, I admit, both are very easy to start programming in and to start shipping broken projects that appear working at first. They are good for learning programming, but terrible for production.
> Rust didn’t really solve memory safety, it just pushed all the complexity into the type system.
Yes, that's what it did, and that's the right tradeoff in most cases. Where the compiler can't make a reasonable default choice, it should force the programmer to make a choice, and then sanity-check it.
> If one was struggling with memory errors in C++ that’s nice. If one was using Java, that still sucks.
It's nice for those struggling with uncaught exceptions, null pointer bugs, mutithreading bugs, and confusing stateful object graphs in Java.
Yes, Golang and Python and Java are very easy to start programming in. And unless we’re dealing with some really complex problem, like next-gen cryptocurrencies ;), by the time the Rust teams have gotten their code working and nice and proper as any Rust code needs to be, the Golang/Python/Java teams have already released to customers.
If one wants to be super-cautios and move accordingly slower to be really really sure they have no memory errors then that’s fine. There’s a market for that stuff. But selling this approach as a general solution is disingenuous.
...have already released a broken prototype that appears to be working for now.
I'm yet to see a case where manually "hardening" your software is faster than writing a "similarly-good" program in Rust. That's just anti-automation. Why repeat the same work in every project and bloat your codebase, when the compiler can carry that burden for you? In my experience, Rust makes you write production-grade software faster than when using other languages.
> But selling this approach as a general solution is disingenuous.
I agree! There are legitimate cases where releasing a broken prototype as quickly as possible is important. There's room for that.
But I agrue that it's not the case for most "serious" production software that would be maintained for any period of time. And that Rust is the preferable option for writing such production software.
But they don’t because the compiler does not carry the burden for you. It puts the burden of writing code in a way that satisfies the Rust lifetime management design on you, and that’s what you’ll be doing forever.
There zero proof that Rust software is higher quality than equivalent e.g. Swift or Java. The memory-safety trick only works against C and C++.
I never said that. I said that it's more appropriate and productive.
> If it were really “preferable for writing such production software”, more people would be using it.
There are many valid reasons for not using it, even in new projects. Such as human preferences, lack of specific libraries, and simply not having time to learn yet another language for a non-10x benefit.
> the compiler does not carry the burden for you. It puts the burden of writing code in a way that satisfies the Rust lifetime management design on you, and that’s what you’ll be doing forever.
It carries a different burden for me. In exchange for the burden that you mention, I don't worry about mutable aliasing bugs (including data races), breaking the code by refactoring it, manually unit-testing basic properties that could be types, debugging non-obvious non-local effects (such as exceptions and null values invisibly propagating through the layers of the app), micro-optimizing the performance manually, and so on. The benefits are known. I've almost forgot how to use a debugger at this point.
It's a tradeoff. I find it more comfortable and less cognitively-taxing to work this way, once the initial learning curve is behind. Less unpredictable problems to distract you from solving the problem. The borrow checker problems largely go away as you get more comfortable with it. And it's a skill that's instantly transferrable between all Rust projects, unlike project-specific defensive practices in other languages (the "manual hardening" needed to get decent quality). It's a long-term investment that automates a small, but not insignificant part of your work.
> There zero proof that Rust software is higher quality than equivalent e.g. Swift or Java.
The Google's director of engineering gave a talk saying that their Rust teams are just as productive as their Go teams, while also enjoying "a decreased defect rate over time": https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1bpwmud/media_lars_be...
> The memory-safety trick only works against C and C++.
That's absolutely true, and that's an important thing to keep in mind when framing discussions about Rust.
Maybe Rust isn't optimized for throwaway projects and that's fine.
But it requires a different mindset which I think many in our industry finds hard to work with. Rust exposes the imperfections rather than hiding them until you explicitly check for them like in most other languages.
Just clone and unwrap liberally and throwaway projects go fast.
Starting something in Rust only makes sense for very few domains and software categories.
Python belongs to the complicated languages section, people that think Python is straightforward never bothered reading all the manuals, nor had to put up with all the breaking changes throughout its history, it wasn't only 2 => 3, that was the major event, every release breaks something, even if little.
I am not sure what you mean by this. I write go code pretty much everyday and that code looks vaguely the same as it would do in C#, or Python, or JavaScript.
> Python belongs to the complicated languages section, people that think Python is straightforward never bothered reading all the manuals, nor had to put up with all the breaking changes throughout its history, it wasn't only 2 => 3, that was the major event, every release breaks something, even if little.
I've read the manuals. Most docs appear to be reasonably well written, even if I find many of the examples a bit odd (I've never been a big fan of Monty Python, so the spam and eggs examples are all a bit odd).
The 2 => 3 change was probably a big thing for those migrating all the existing libraries, frameworks. But as someone that uses it for prototyping stuff, I barely noticed the difference.