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I agree. It makes the community looks childish and inexperienced by association. I think I recall reading somewhere on Rust's website that telling project main

by simias 9y ago

I agree. It makes the community looks childish and inexperienced by association. I think I recall reading somewhere on Rust's website that telling project maintainers to switch to Rust was frowned upon, however I can't find it right now. Sometimes I feel like it should be written in a 20pt font on the home page. Or maybe written in blinking letters every time you run rustup. I always feel it's very presumptuous and somewhat disrespectful to second guess the devs of a project, in particular if you're not a big contributor yourself. Pay your dues. These messages are effectively not a whole lot more useful or insightful than saying "Rust rulez, C droolz" or "have you considered indenting with spaces instead of tabs?".

steveklabnik 9y ago
To be clear, you can take it from me: yes, don't go tell people to re-write things in Rust. Agree 100% that it's presumptuous and disrespectful. At the same time, I don't see it actually happening as much as people say that it happens. Maybe I just don't see those things. If I did, I'd tell them to cut it out.
sgift 9y ago
People have told me for the longest time that Java is a shitty language I shouldn't be using. Most of those people said C++ would be a far better idea without even bothering to show any reason why C++ would be more suited besides "Java is slow, huahuaha, it is shitty, huahahaha". So, I have to admit I take a bit of a pleasure of seeing those people getting challenged on their presumption that C++ is the greatest language on earth. Language advocacy is far older than Rust. And many language advocates are far more obnoxious than what I read on HN with regard to Rust. I actually have the feeling that the C++ crowd is just a bit sad that the usual defense of "well, yeah, other languages do those things better, but the code they produce is far too slow for our problem, so they're useless!" doesn't cut it anymore.
- mschuster91 9y ago
  > People have told me for the longest time that Java is a shitty language I shouldn't be using. Java is a great language in theory, the problem with Java is that people have evolved to use layers upon layers upon even more layers of abstractions, the tooling is horrenduos (try configuring maven vs npm) and especially all complex Java applications end up being as slow as molasses (e.g. SAP GUI, Lotus Notes, Eclipse, jDownloader, Vuze on the GUI application side). This leads to people projecting their horrible experiences with the Java ecosystem and applications to the language itself, which is a pity.
  - legosteen11 9y ago
    How is Maven (or Gradle, but I prefer Maven) bad? I've never used npm, but I quite like Maven's use of XML for defining project dependencies etc. with clear structure.
    - qznc 9y ago
      I have very little experience with Maven, but I find it hard to understand and restricting. Maybe I should take the time to learn the fundamentals properly and maybe I would be enlightened, but it seems to work very different to other build tools. Example "Lifecycles" [0]. The documentation says "Maven is based around the central concept of a build lifecycle. What this means is that the process for building and distributing a particular artifact (project) is clearly defined." The first sentence just says "this is important!". I have no idea what that second sentence is supposed to tell me. The documentation goes on without a clear definition what a lifecycle is. I figure it is a kind of command. Afterall, the basic lifecycles are "default" which is "make all", "clean" like "make clean", and "site" like "make docs". I'm not sure, there is no good definition of "lifecycle" in the documentation there. Hard to understand. Well, there is a predefined set of lifecycles and each lifecycle has a predefined list of phases, where stuff can hook into. For example, with java the compile phase will turn my java files into class files. The test phase will turn class files into test reports. Recently, I wanted to merge multiple coverage reports [1]. Turns out, this is done in a compile phase, which is reasonable. However, the reports are generated in the test phase, which is after the compile phase. At this point, I'm lost. This corset of phases is restricting me. [0] https://maven.apache.org/guides/introduction/introduction-to-the-lifecycle.html https://maven.apache.org/guides/introduction/introduction-to... [1] http://www.eclemma.org/jacoco/trunk/doc/merge-mojo.html http://www.eclemma.org/jacoco/trunk/doc/merge-mojo.html
      - twic 9y ago
        Spot on. As a Java developer, i've bounced around between Maven, Gradle, and ad-hoc shell scripts (and Ant back in the day!), and just cannot understand how so many people still think Maven is any good. It's not the XML - that's a superficial annoyance. It's the elaborate but extremely rigid model of what a project is and what a build is, that makes even the smallest deviation from a completely vanilla project excruciatingly painful. Gradle has all sorts of failings, and is overly complex in its own way, but at least it gets the meta-model right: provide fundamental tools for building a graph of tasks with dependencies between them, and ship a set of hopefully useful tasks built on top of that.
- blub 9y ago
  The Java community is a poor example to make your point, since it's always been vicious and obnoxious in relation to C++. It was partly built on tearing down C++. The reaction of some parts of the Java community to Hypertable choosing C++ instead of Java was nothing short of embarrassing for instance, but it's not just that, over the years I have seen too many examples to list :)
  - twic 9y ago
    The C++ world hasn't exactly been kind to Java either. The two languages have the kind of vitriolic contempt for each other that only siblings could have.

by simias 9y ago

steveklabnik 9y ago

To be clear, you can take it from me: yes, don't go tell people to re-write things in Rust. Agree 100% that it's presumptuous and disrespectful. At the same time, I don't see it actually happening as much as people say that it happens. Maybe I just don't see those things. If I did, I'd tell them to cut it out.

sgift 9y ago

People have told me for the longest time that Java is a shitty language I shouldn't be using. Most of those people said C++ would be a far better idea without even bothering to show any reason why C++ would be more suited besides "Java is slow, huahuaha, it is shitty, huahahaha". So, I have to admit I take a bit of a pleasure of seeing those people getting challenged on their presumption that C++ is the greatest language on earth. Language advocacy is far older than Rust. And many language advocates are far more obnoxious than what I read on HN with regard to Rust. I actually have the feeling that the C++ crowd is just a bit sad that the usual defense of "well, yeah, other languages do those things better, but the code they produce is far too slow for our problem, so they're useless!" doesn't cut it anymore.

mschuster91 9y ago
> People have told me for the longest time that Java is a shitty language I shouldn't be using. Java is a great language in theory, the problem with Java is that people have evolved to use layers upon layers upon even more layers of abstractions, the tooling is horrenduos (try configuring maven vs npm) and especially all complex Java applications end up being as slow as molasses (e.g. SAP GUI, Lotus Notes, Eclipse, jDownloader, Vuze on the GUI application side). This leads to people projecting their horrible experiences with the Java ecosystem and applications to the language itself, which is a pity.
- legosteen11 9y ago
  How is Maven (or Gradle, but I prefer Maven) bad? I've never used npm, but I quite like Maven's use of XML for defining project dependencies etc. with clear structure.
  - qznc 9y ago
    I have very little experience with Maven, but I find it hard to understand and restricting. Maybe I should take the time to learn the fundamentals properly and maybe I would be enlightened, but it seems to work very different to other build tools. Example "Lifecycles" [0]. The documentation says "Maven is based around the central concept of a build lifecycle. What this means is that the process for building and distributing a particular artifact (project) is clearly defined." The first sentence just says "this is important!". I have no idea what that second sentence is supposed to tell me. The documentation goes on without a clear definition what a lifecycle is. I figure it is a kind of command. Afterall, the basic lifecycles are "default" which is "make all", "clean" like "make clean", and "site" like "make docs". I'm not sure, there is no good definition of "lifecycle" in the documentation there. Hard to understand. Well, there is a predefined set of lifecycles and each lifecycle has a predefined list of phases, where stuff can hook into. For example, with java the compile phase will turn my java files into class files. The test phase will turn class files into test reports. Recently, I wanted to merge multiple coverage reports [1]. Turns out, this is done in a compile phase, which is reasonable. However, the reports are generated in the test phase, which is after the compile phase. At this point, I'm lost. This corset of phases is restricting me. [0] https://maven.apache.org/guides/introduction/introduction-to-the-lifecycle.html https://maven.apache.org/guides/introduction/introduction-to... [1] http://www.eclemma.org/jacoco/trunk/doc/merge-mojo.html http://www.eclemma.org/jacoco/trunk/doc/merge-mojo.html
    - twic 9y ago
      Spot on. As a Java developer, i've bounced around between Maven, Gradle, and ad-hoc shell scripts (and Ant back in the day!), and just cannot understand how so many people still think Maven is any good. It's not the XML - that's a superficial annoyance. It's the elaborate but extremely rigid model of what a project is and what a build is, that makes even the smallest deviation from a completely vanilla project excruciatingly painful. Gradle has all sorts of failings, and is overly complex in its own way, but at least it gets the meta-model right: provide fundamental tools for building a graph of tasks with dependencies between them, and ship a set of hopefully useful tasks built on top of that.
blub 9y ago
The Java community is a poor example to make your point, since it's always been vicious and obnoxious in relation to C++. It was partly built on tearing down C++. The reaction of some parts of the Java community to Hypertable choosing C++ instead of Java was nothing short of embarrassing for instance, but it's not just that, over the years I have seen too many examples to list :)
- twic 9y ago
  The C++ world hasn't exactly been kind to Java either. The two languages have the kind of vitriolic contempt for each other that only siblings could have.