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> Now this whole section feels a lot like "I'm trying to code in Rust like in C and it doesn't work and it frustrates me". Who's fault is that? Rust seems lik

by cwyers 9y ago

> Now this whole section feels a lot like "I'm trying to code in Rust like in C and it doesn't work and it frustrates me". Who's fault is that? Rust seems like an attempt to take a lot of foreign concepts to C/C++ programmers and dress them up in ALGOLy syntax. If you look at Rust's influences page[1], there's stuff from ML, Haskell, Erlang... and yet Rust code examples I've seen all look like "slightly weird C++." If Rust wasn't meant to be written like C/C++, it could spend less time aping it and more time looking like languages where you expect to come across ADTs and the like. 1) https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/influences.html https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/influences.html

kbenson 9y ago
Any language deserves to be assessed on its own merit, not what people's preconceptions are. I still believe that a lot of the flak Perl gets is from people that see that it looks somewhat like C and make assumptions, and are surprised when it turns out that it has a few surprises up its sleeve (e.g. context). The fault lies with the person who purports to learn a language, but then doesn't reassess their assumptions when confronted with evidence to the contrary.
pcwalton 9y ago
Well, like it or not, one of the primary audiences of Rust is C and C++ programmers. They're the people who write low-level code. There's not much we can do about that; we might as well serve our customers as well as we can.
- cwyers 9y ago
  > we might as well serve our customers as well as we can. Sure, but what part of serving them involves dragging them on Hacker News when they try and write C-like code in Rust?
  - pcwalton 9y ago
    I don't think we should be upset with people for their legitimate frustrations. But I do think we should be honest with the basic limitations of what we set out to do. A safe language that has dynamic allocation without GC simply has to have a borrow checker, and as far as we know that borrow checker has to have some limitations. Those limitations prevent some kind of code from being written in the same way it was written in C.
weberc2 9y ago
I'm really glad it doesn't do this. I spend a fair amount of time writing or reading Rust, Python, CoffeeScript, Haskell, OCaml, etc (in no particular order) and I find Rust to be much more readable, largely due to braces, commas, and parens in intuitive places.

by cwyers 9y ago

kbenson 9y ago

Any language deserves to be assessed on its own merit, not what people's preconceptions are. I still believe that a lot of the flak Perl gets is from people that see that it looks somewhat like C and make assumptions, and are surprised when it turns out that it has a few surprises up its sleeve (e.g. context). The fault lies with the person who purports to learn a language, but then doesn't reassess their assumptions when confronted with evidence to the contrary.

pcwalton 9y ago

Well, like it or not, one of the primary audiences of Rust is C and C++ programmers. They're the people who write low-level code. There's not much we can do about that; we might as well serve our customers as well as we can.

cwyers 9y ago
> we might as well serve our customers as well as we can. Sure, but what part of serving them involves dragging them on Hacker News when they try and write C-like code in Rust?
- pcwalton 9y ago
  I don't think we should be upset with people for their legitimate frustrations. But I do think we should be honest with the basic limitations of what we set out to do. A safe language that has dynamic allocation without GC simply has to have a borrow checker, and as far as we know that borrow checker has to have some limitations. Those limitations prevent some kind of code from being written in the same way it was written in C.

weberc2 9y ago

I'm really glad it doesn't do this. I spend a fair amount of time writing or reading Rust, Python, CoffeeScript, Haskell, OCaml, etc (in no particular order) and I find Rust to be much more readable, largely due to braces, commas, and parens in intuitive places.