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> I don't mean to burst your bubble here. You won't. > But people need to feel productive quickly with a language, otherwise they'll drop it and move to somet

> I don't mean to burst your bubble here. You won't. > But people need to feel productive quickly with a language, otherwise they'll drop it and move to something else which makes them feel that way. This is relative. Rust is far easier to learn than C++. It has a compiler that will even enforce that you don't shoot yourself in the foot. It also has nice tooling to get you up and running quickly. It has good documentation. It has a free book. We've had no trouble getting our new grads up and running with Rust. It's not that hard. > Javascript is thought of as a terrible language by language snobs, and yet it has a huge following. Having a huge following doesn't make it less terrible by the measures of PL theory or sensibility. It's also the only choice on the web, but that may soon change, Rust has first class support for wasm so it's in a good spot there. > Haskell, on the other hand, is much beloved, and doesn't. Don't get me wrong, it's got its share of love, but hasn't seen the explosive growth that python or java has. By most accounts the Haskell ecosystem and user base are quite large considering it is intended as a research language, and the community is still growing. Rust isn't intended for research, and it's incredibly young compared to Java or Python, so it has plenty of time to catch up. > but people were so much more productive with Java. Hahaha. You mean people wrote a lot of Java. Let's please make the distinction between productivity and writing a bunch of enterprise crapware churned out by barrelful. > They didn't have to worry about memory management, segfaults, crazy C++ semantics, etc. That's exactly what Rust does for you. > Companies were more willing to throw hardware at a problem to reduce risk/time in development. And that is still true today. Actually companies are becoming more aware that speed is a feature, and that Moore's law isn't holding out. We're also moving to smaller form factors: phones, watches, glasses... the future is not on the desktop by any means, and no one wants to waste capacity in a datacenter needlessly.

dman 8y ago
I think Rust should stop looking at C++ as the becnhmark / comparison point for complexity. The expectations that developers have from languages has increased over time, and Rust itself has contributed to raising that bar.
- steveklabnik 8y ago
  We don’t generally consider other languages as a measure of what complexity is “okay” or something, and are extremely aware of Rust’s complexity. Rust has a lot of requirements that directly lead to a lot of that complexity. But it’s neccesary, not incidental. Or that’s the hope, at least. Rust is also not perfect.
  - bb88 8y ago
    A lot of (but not all) complexity is solved in C/Python/Java by throwing a data structure at the problem. But is it a fair statement to say that not all data structures will work in Rust? Or is it better to say that some data structures work better in Rust than others?
    - ovao 8y ago
      Writing certain data structures in safe Rust can be hard, but not impossible. I’m not aware of any data structures that simply cannot be written in Rust.
      - Tuna-Fish 8y ago
        Of course, since anything that can be written in C can be written in unsafe Rust. Though, reading the post above yours, I was thinking more about the use of data structures than the implementation of them. In C++, when faced by the need to efficiently iterate through a data structure in different, incompatible orders, the tool of choice is often just to make intrusive linked lists with multiple next pointers per element. I think I've even once implemented something that was a priority queue (heap), two different lists and a tree at a same time. While doing that in Rust is by no means impossible, it seems to me that the use of such a structure would be much more clumsy in Rust, to the point where I would try hard to solve the problem in some different way. The languages are all turing-compatible anyway, so it's not about what can be done, it's about what approaches does the language make easy and promote. Overall I really like the kind of code idiomatic Rust tends to end up like.
bb88 8y ago
See the thing is that I agree with most of your statements, so you're really not changing my mind with your arguments. > Actually companies are becoming more aware that speed is a feature No. If that were true, Python wouldn't be the fastest growing language, and we'd be hand optimizing everything in assembly and using languages that allowed us to do that (C). That was the entire point I was making. It's why Java won. I can't figure out if Rust is serious about being a true competitor, or just merely riding the peak on the Gartner Hype Cycle [1]. [1] https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/gartner-hype-cycle https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/gartner-hy...
- ilovecaching 8y ago
  Python is growing because it's a good scripting language, and there's a need in the ML community for a standard language to write scripts in. The ML community is growing like crazy, thus Python grows. Even though Python is secretly calling Fortran for scipy, or Tensorflow (C++), or PyTorch (also C++), all of which would make good candidates for Rust replacements. So obviously speed is necessary to enable what people are doing in Python. I make the distinction between script and what we software engineers do, because I had the misfortune of spending half a decade in research doing ML, and those guys are not writing production programs. They're hacking out Jupyter notebooks and writing precariously balanced code that barely works. That doesn't make Python suitable for large applications. It doesn't diminish the fact that CUDA is growing, SGX is growing, embedded is growing, that we're now unlocking 100G fiber, that we've reached the limits of single core performance, that intel is rolling out 8+ core consumer CPUs. Python is not going to shine for any of these things, but Rust will.
  - scardine 8y ago
    tl;dr: despite being relatively slow Python is a fantastic glue language. Some people thing rust is well positioned to steal Python's dinner.
    - ilovecaching 8y ago
      That's not what I said. I said Rust was a good candidate for all the things Python is using to actually do useful work. The underlying libraries written in Fortran, C, and C++. Don't tl;dr; if you don't know how to r.

dman 8y ago

I think Rust should stop looking at C++ as the becnhmark / comparison point for complexity. The expectations that developers have from languages has increased over time, and Rust itself has contributed to raising that bar.

steveklabnik 8y ago
We don’t generally consider other languages as a measure of what complexity is “okay” or something, and are extremely aware of Rust’s complexity. Rust has a lot of requirements that directly lead to a lot of that complexity. But it’s neccesary, not incidental. Or that’s the hope, at least. Rust is also not perfect.
- bb88 8y ago
  A lot of (but not all) complexity is solved in C/Python/Java by throwing a data structure at the problem. But is it a fair statement to say that not all data structures will work in Rust? Or is it better to say that some data structures work better in Rust than others?
  - ovao 8y ago
    Writing certain data structures in safe Rust can be hard, but not impossible. I’m not aware of any data structures that simply cannot be written in Rust.
    - Tuna-Fish 8y ago
      Of course, since anything that can be written in C can be written in unsafe Rust. Though, reading the post above yours, I was thinking more about the use of data structures than the implementation of them. In C++, when faced by the need to efficiently iterate through a data structure in different, incompatible orders, the tool of choice is often just to make intrusive linked lists with multiple next pointers per element. I think I've even once implemented something that was a priority queue (heap), two different lists and a tree at a same time. While doing that in Rust is by no means impossible, it seems to me that the use of such a structure would be much more clumsy in Rust, to the point where I would try hard to solve the problem in some different way. The languages are all turing-compatible anyway, so it's not about what can be done, it's about what approaches does the language make easy and promote. Overall I really like the kind of code idiomatic Rust tends to end up like.

bb88 8y ago

See the thing is that I agree with most of your statements, so you're really not changing my mind with your arguments. > Actually companies are becoming more aware that speed is a feature No. If that were true, Python wouldn't be the fastest growing language, and we'd be hand optimizing everything in assembly and using languages that allowed us to do that (C). That was the entire point I was making. It's why Java won. I can't figure out if Rust is serious about being a true competitor, or just merely riding the peak on the Gartner Hype Cycle [1]. [1] https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/gartner-hype-cycle https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/gartner-hy...

ilovecaching 8y ago
Python is growing because it's a good scripting language, and there's a need in the ML community for a standard language to write scripts in. The ML community is growing like crazy, thus Python grows. Even though Python is secretly calling Fortran for scipy, or Tensorflow (C++), or PyTorch (also C++), all of which would make good candidates for Rust replacements. So obviously speed is necessary to enable what people are doing in Python. I make the distinction between script and what we software engineers do, because I had the misfortune of spending half a decade in research doing ML, and those guys are not writing production programs. They're hacking out Jupyter notebooks and writing precariously balanced code that barely works. That doesn't make Python suitable for large applications. It doesn't diminish the fact that CUDA is growing, SGX is growing, embedded is growing, that we're now unlocking 100G fiber, that we've reached the limits of single core performance, that intel is rolling out 8+ core consumer CPUs. Python is not going to shine for any of these things, but Rust will.
- scardine 8y ago
  tl;dr: despite being relatively slow Python is a fantastic glue language. Some people thing rust is well positioned to steal Python's dinner.
  - ilovecaching 8y ago
    That's not what I said. I said Rust was a good candidate for all the things Python is using to actually do useful work. The underlying libraries written in Fortran, C, and C++. Don't tl;dr; if you don't know how to r.