Comment by steveklabnik | Hacker News Reader

Comment by steveklabnik | Hacker News Reader

I left a comment on Reddit that I'll adapt here. It's really intended at the Rust community specifically, but I think the message is still worthwhile anyway:

Not everyone is going to like Rust. That's totally okay.

I've seen language communities, especially newer ones where people are particularly passionate, essentially turn into... this is a bit strong, but mini-cults. Where if you don't like the language, you're obviously an illliterate pleb who needs to learn how to code. This ends up creating an insular, backwards, dangerous culture. I'd prefer a culture of "we're doing cool stuff, I hope you like it, but reasonable people may not, and that's okay."

I'm not really speaking about any particular language here, please don't try to 'figure out who I'm talking about' or something.

While it's true that the author may have only breifly tried Rust, and not tried to understand design choices, this is going to be the first of many, many blog posts like this as we grow after 1.0. The vast, vast majority of programmers haven't even tried Rust yet. Flamebait blog post titles are a standby of today's programmer culture. We shouldn't get too hung up on it, and instead, focus on doing cool stuff with the people who do get it.

http://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/35pn5a/criticizing_the...

I've been programming for 35 years, and I remember when object-oriented programming advocates seemed cult-like. As it turned out, O-O is a very useful tool, but it is not the ultimate programming paradigm. Time has shown that the early adopters of O-O were mostly justified in their enthusiasm, but tended to overstate the benefits of the technology. The O-O naysayers had concerns about performance, which is an issue in some O-O languages, but one that C++ solved. They also had concerns that O-O was hard to understand, but that is something that has been mostly solved through education. These days, the expectation is that a good programmer understands O-O.

Today, I see similar reactions to leading edge technologies and languages that are difficult to understand, whether they be FP, Rust, or Haskell. Time will tell whether these things break into the mainstream as did O-O, C++, and Java. I personally think that Rust is onto something, but it is too early to know how much impact it will have on the mainstream. Who knows, 10 years from now, we may see a dominant OS and application ecosystem written completely in Rust that has a level of quality seldom seen today. Or maybe we will see some of the ideas in Rust incorporated into a future version of C++. Or maybe Rust and its ideas will prove to be too impractical and will fade away.

I hope to have the time to learn and use Rust soon, but I certainly understand those who prefer to wait and see. What I don't care for is a knee-jerk reaction against something because it is unfamiliar.

> Today, I see similar reactions to leading edge technologies and languages that are difficult to understand, whether they be FP, Rust, or Haskell.

I wouldn't lump all three together just because they may happen to be somewhat difficult to understand. I see your point regarding FP (and Haskell happens to be an FP language). However, Rust is a multi-paradigm language, just the way C++ is. Time and time again in my day job, I see issues in our code that Rust would have prevented at compile time (and we're not using C++).

I didn't mean to imply that Rust was only FP; I was just listing examples of current leading edge technologies and languages.

Thanks for writing this, can't be upvoted enough!

You're welcome. I'm no perfect person either, but this is what I strive to be like these days.

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