• ferralcat@monyet.cc
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    11 months ago

    Ive never gotten to write rust professionally, but I have always kinda winder d if it was marketed wrong. My thought was always that it should be sold as “easy” though. Its easy to write code. It’s hard(er) to make mistakes.

    I kinda figure there’s a bunch of systems programmers with their heads up their asses who would never be caught dead writing in an “easy” language though, so it couldn’t go that way.

    (I got bored and started skimming halfway though this article, but it’s neat to hear about up and coming languages I’ll never use at the end)

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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      11 months ago

      But it’s not easy. Understanding how memory works isn’t easy, and satisfying the borrow checker is even harder. There are quite a few things that the borrow checker rejects that are completely fine, so you also may need to relearn some idioms.

      Perhaps it would be better to market it as encouraging “sustainable” code. By that I mean:

      • lower chance of introducing concurrency bugs if you stick to safe rust
      • smother, safer refactors due to the type system and borrow checker
      • better long term performance because memory related performance issues are more obvious
      • strong nudge toward smaller structures because a lack of inheritance makes massive structures more of a pain to deal with

      And so on. It encourages a more sustainable codebase, though you’ll pay for that upfront.

    • lysdexic@programming.devOP
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      11 months ago

      Ive never gotten to write rust professionally, but I have always kinda winder d if it was marketed wrong. My thought was always that it should be sold as “easy” though. Its easy to write code. It’s hard(er) to make mistakes.

      I agree, but I don’t think the problem is marketing. The problem is how some elements of Rust’s community desperately try to upsell the language beyond the value it actually can provide, and once that fails they fall back to toxic behavior and basically just mindlessly shitting on anything that’s not Rust. It goes well beyond a cargo cult mentality, and it’s sad that a fine technology is dragged through the mud by those who were expected to show its value.