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Comment by cpp098 | Hacker News Reader

New languages always are trap. Programmers always waste too much time on new languages or some tricky language syntax. They should focus on the business.

I will never try Rust.

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Well, we first spent six months on 'cannot call function undefined of undefined'. We could have spent the last three on 'segfault' instead. Rust let us spend that time on actually experimenting instead of just fighting the computer all the time.

Spending 3 months on a segfault? In any language even a mediocre programmer you can usually resolve a null reference exception / segfault in a couple of hours at the most. With a complex program and a debugger it could be a minute or so. Maybe if it only happens in production and you don't capture stack traces or core dump files... but this happens once and then you learn your lesson.

He obviously meant the general class of errors, not one specific bug.

Rust isn't what you seem to think it is. It targets a very specific area that's been dominated by C/C++ only because there wasn't anything better out there.

Rust still has a long way to go, but it's making progress and I would personally like to see a world where Rust is the go-to language for systems software.

Why can't you practice Rust in a non-business environment?

Programmers always spend too much time on studying which hammer is better, but they forget what they really want to do, right?

I agree there is some truth in what you're saying. However, without programmer's curiosity and desire to create new interesting and beautiful languages, we would still be "focused on business" and writing code in COBOL, Fortran, C, Pascal...

I agree with you generally -for me, given that I already know java well, it's clearly not worth the effort to spend much time on (say) Go. I make an exception here, because I think Rust has genuinely useful new ideas brought to the table.

I don't think that was the case for me at least. I felt like (using your own analogy) the more I studied Rust, the better I learned how to use every other hammer. Learning a new programming language helped me learn c++ better since I was constantly on the lookout for potential memory leaks and other common pitfalls that Rust prevents. Now when I code in c++, I always try to write the code with safety in mind.

This is the stone-age of computer science. Things aren't really going to get better at the behest of programming language luddites who think their 40-odd years of experience constitutes the whole future of technological progress.

I actually agree with you in general, but in this case we spent six months hammering in nails with a wet sandwich because the only available hammer has a chainsaw for a handle ("it's perfectly safe, just don't ever press the on-switch"). This blog post is me seeing something that looks like an actual hammer and suspiciously looking for a trap.

Oh of course. People are too hung up on tools to get the job done, but you're case is oh-so different.

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