5 ms·

Because people underestimate the amount of effort needed to learn a new language at first?

by insulfrable 8y ago

steveklabnik 8y ago
I'm not sure it's that simple. I've never heard anyone say this about Go, for example.
- zaphar 8y ago
  To be fair, Go is uniquely designed to be easy to learn and become productive with quickly. It was practically a design goal of the language.
  - steveklabnik 8y ago
    Sure. I think it's one of Go's strongest points. But it's still a counter-example to the parent's point. Learning a new language does not inherently require a lot of effort, and so expecting it to be reasonably easy, especially when you're an experienced developer, doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
    - tonyarkles 8y ago
      Go does still suffer from people bringing idioms and assumptions from other languages, and that has leaked somewhat into common libraries. I've been away from it for a while (mostly doing very low-level C on microcontrollers these days), but there was a lot of Go code I came across that just screamed "This was written by a Java developer who is learning Go!" I had a great time writing Go web services, and I definitely agree that it was easy to pick up, both for me and other teammates. Figuring out the idiomatic way to do things wasn't always straightforward though, although getting up and running was easy.
Gibbon1 8y ago
Have not used rust but I'm assuming it's because when you're down a rat hole rust stops you cold at every turn. You need to back up and rethink what you're trying to do. But when you don't have a good handle on what rust is complaining about you can't see that.
- atoav 8y ago
  The books are incredibly well written. When people are “stopped cold at every turn” they are usually programmers who come to Rust with a metric ton of existing assumptions how to solve certain problems, without really thinking about the concepts of the language itself. When a C++ programmer starts with python they will write incedibly “unpythonic” code, when they do the same thing in Rust, it just won’t compile. IMO Rust is very straightforward and the std library is incredibly good. But you have to really understand certain core concepts and what they mean in terms of structuring your code. Just like that C++ programmer needed to learn what is ideomatic python looks like and why it makes a lot more sense to write python that way, you need to find the rust way of things. But this is the same for every progtamming language out there..
  - Gibbon1 8y ago
    You've restated the point I was trying to make much better than I did.
  - noir_lord 8y ago
    I agree entirely. One of the reasons why when I learn a new language I deliberately research the idiomatic way to write that language, it saves a bunch of trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole time. Also some languages purely because of the domain they are in can do things in ways that others can't (trivially) do so if you treat each language as "foo" with different syntax you end up hobbling yourself to the lowest common denominator of "foo"'s features across every language you use.
masklinn 8y ago
There's plenty of languages which take limited / little efforts to learn. So I'd say more that the unfamiliar concepts need to stew or sink in. One way is to just keep at it until it clicks. An other way is to not do that, but once you've got the words for something you start seeing the issue everywhere, and next time around it makes a lot more sense.
atoav 8y ago
For real Beginners to programming Rust can be hard, because concepts like pointers are hard in most languages that use them. For Programmers that try Rust out Rust can be hard because they are stubornly trying to program Rust as if it were Python/Java/C/C++/Foo – but it isn't. Rust as a language makes certain types of approaches (or anti patterns) nearly impossible. In the beginning it happens quite often that after a day of struggle you will erase a Rube-Goldberg-Machine that does something simple and replace it with the right line of code that does exactly the same while beeing way more extensible. If you find yourself building more and more elaborate structures just to get something very simple done, the problem is very likely your approach (e.g. trying to implement a OOP structure instead of solving the problem) – at least that is what happend to me a lot. Rust's borrowing and ownership concepts, as well as traits and generics make it extremely powerful, but these concepts lend themselves better to certain ways of structuring code than to others. Learning something is in my opinion always about allowing something to change your perspective. If you are not allowing the thing you are learning to change you, chances are that you are not learning, but judging.
- woolvalley 8y ago
  From my friends that have tried rust, creating a graph or doubly linked list without using some special structures is fairly painful or impossible. You can create a graph by using some sort of adjacency matrix or some other kind of structure that keeps ownership in some sort of tree without much pain, but that has it's own downsides.
  - rwmj 8y ago
    This was also my experience. It's a fine language if you can't (or more usually "won't" for spurious reasons) use a garbage collector. However a lot of things are just easier to do using a GC, and I suspect in many, not all, of the use cases of Rust, a GC would be just fine. (Also I have to rant here a bit: Yes I know the GC you used in Java or Emacs in 1997 was terrible, but modern GCs are very good indeed)
    - tasty_freeze 8y ago

Because people underestimate the amount of effort needed to learn a new language at first?

steveklabnik 8y ago

I'm not sure it's that simple. I've never heard anyone say this about Go, for example.

zaphar 8y ago
To be fair, Go is uniquely designed to be easy to learn and become productive with quickly. It was practically a design goal of the language.
- steveklabnik 8y ago
  Sure. I think it's one of Go's strongest points. But it's still a counter-example to the parent's point. Learning a new language does not inherently require a lot of effort, and so expecting it to be reasonably easy, especially when you're an experienced developer, doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
  - tonyarkles 8y ago
    Go does still suffer from people bringing idioms and assumptions from other languages, and that has leaked somewhat into common libraries. I've been away from it for a while (mostly doing very low-level C on microcontrollers these days), but there was a lot of Go code I came across that just screamed "This was written by a Java developer who is learning Go!" I had a great time writing Go web services, and I definitely agree that it was easy to pick up, both for me and other teammates. Figuring out the idiomatic way to do things wasn't always straightforward though, although getting up and running was easy.

Gibbon1 8y ago

Have not used rust but I'm assuming it's because when you're down a rat hole rust stops you cold at every turn. You need to back up and rethink what you're trying to do. But when you don't have a good handle on what rust is complaining about you can't see that.

atoav 8y ago
The books are incredibly well written. When people are “stopped cold at every turn” they are usually programmers who come to Rust with a metric ton of existing assumptions how to solve certain problems, without really thinking about the concepts of the language itself. When a C++ programmer starts with python they will write incedibly “unpythonic” code, when they do the same thing in Rust, it just won’t compile. IMO Rust is very straightforward and the std library is incredibly good. But you have to really understand certain core concepts and what they mean in terms of structuring your code. Just like that C++ programmer needed to learn what is ideomatic python looks like and why it makes a lot more sense to write python that way, you need to find the rust way of things. But this is the same for every progtamming language out there..
- Gibbon1 8y ago
  You've restated the point I was trying to make much better than I did.
- noir_lord 8y ago
  I agree entirely. One of the reasons why when I learn a new language I deliberately research the idiomatic way to write that language, it saves a bunch of trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole time. Also some languages purely because of the domain they are in can do things in ways that others can't (trivially) do so if you treat each language as "foo" with different syntax you end up hobbling yourself to the lowest common denominator of "foo"'s features across every language you use.

masklinn 8y ago

There's plenty of languages which take limited / little efforts to learn. So I'd say more that the unfamiliar concepts need to stew or sink in. One way is to just keep at it until it clicks. An other way is to not do that, but once you've got the words for something you start seeing the issue everywhere, and next time around it makes a lot more sense.

atoav 8y ago

For real Beginners to programming Rust can be hard, because concepts like pointers are hard in most languages that use them. For Programmers that try Rust out Rust can be hard because they are stubornly trying to program Rust as if it were Python/Java/C/C++/Foo – but it isn't. Rust as a language makes certain types of approaches (or anti patterns) nearly impossible. In the beginning it happens quite often that after a day of struggle you will erase a Rube-Goldberg-Machine that does something simple and replace it with the right line of code that does exactly the same while beeing way more extensible. If you find yourself building more and more elaborate structures just to get something very simple done, the problem is very likely your approach (e.g. trying to implement a OOP structure instead of solving the problem) – at least that is what happend to me a lot. Rust's borrowing and ownership concepts, as well as traits and generics make it extremely powerful, but these concepts lend themselves better to certain ways of structuring code than to others. Learning something is in my opinion always about allowing something to change your perspective. If you are not allowing the thing you are learning to change you, chances are that you are not learning, but judging.

woolvalley 8y ago
From my friends that have tried rust, creating a graph or doubly linked list without using some special structures is fairly painful or impossible. You can create a graph by using some sort of adjacency matrix or some other kind of structure that keeps ownership in some sort of tree without much pain, but that has it's own downsides.
- rwmj 8y ago
  This was also my experience. It's a fine language if you can't (or more usually "won't" for spurious reasons) use a garbage collector. However a lot of things are just easier to do using a GC, and I suspect in many, not all, of the use cases of Rust, a GC would be just fine. (Also I have to rant here a bit: Yes I know the GC you used in Java or Emacs in 1997 was terrible, but modern GCs are very good indeed)
  - tasty_freeze 8y ago