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Really who cares? Pick a language. They are both fine. Both will probably solve whatever problem you have without too many issues. Arguing over which one you s

by boyter 7y ago

Really who cares? Pick a language. They are both fine. Both will probably solve whatever problem you have without too many issues. Arguing over which one you should use its probably pointless 99% of the time. I wish I had a link to the twitter exchange between both accounts where the answer they both agreed with was learn both, and lets have this conversation in a week. It feels 100% relevant here.

AceJohnny2 7y ago
Programming languages are tools that require significant career investment. Sure you can learn the basics in a 21 Days[1], but that's not going to land you a Senior Developer salary. You're choosing a horse to ride for many years, and if you chose the wrong horse, you're going to find yourself in a crimp. But horses/languages don't have value in a vacuum. They have value because the industry recognizes them. You'll have fewer options if your main expertise is D or OCaml than if you're a C++ developer. So you get advocacy posts about this or that language to increase their recognition in the industry. Attract developers to build the libraries and ecosystem needs. Attract developers to improve the compiler in ways that are useful to everyone. So you need to cheer for this horse over that horse, because your career depends on it. [1] https://norvig.com/21-days.html https://norvig.com/21-days.html
- hu3 7y ago
  But Rust and Go have different goals. If there was ever a definition of apples to oranges, Rust and Go would be it.
  - anderspitman 7y ago
    Depends on what axes you're looking at. There are a large class of tasks where 10 years ago I would have used C, C++, Python, or Java for, which I could now use Rust or Go and get an improved result with either.
bad_user 7y ago
> learn both This is a common advice but it isn't realistic. It takes a lot of time to learn a language, its tools, its most popular libraries, its best practices, to interact with its community, to see in what problem domains it shines, etc. I'd say you need to give it more than a year, more than two if you're not doing it on the job. You can churn code much sooner than that obviously, that's not what we are taking about. Nobody does that to see which language is best. And those that do are doing it superficially, writing a hello world or two and then jumping to conclusions. This advice basically makes no sense and yet people keep repeating it.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

by boyter 7y ago

AceJohnny2 7y ago

Programming languages are tools that require significant career investment. Sure you can learn the basics in a 21 Days[1], but that's not going to land you a Senior Developer salary. You're choosing a horse to ride for many years, and if you chose the wrong horse, you're going to find yourself in a crimp. But horses/languages don't have value in a vacuum. They have value because the industry recognizes them. You'll have fewer options if your main expertise is D or OCaml than if you're a C++ developer. So you get advocacy posts about this or that language to increase their recognition in the industry. Attract developers to build the libraries and ecosystem needs. Attract developers to improve the compiler in ways that are useful to everyone. So you need to cheer for this horse over that horse, because your career depends on it. [1] https://norvig.com/21-days.html https://norvig.com/21-days.html

hu3 7y ago
But Rust and Go have different goals. If there was ever a definition of apples to oranges, Rust and Go would be it.
- anderspitman 7y ago
  Depends on what axes you're looking at. There are a large class of tasks where 10 years ago I would have used C, C++, Python, or Java for, which I could now use Rust or Go and get an improved result with either.

bad_user 7y ago

> learn both This is a common advice but it isn't realistic. It takes a lot of time to learn a language, its tools, its most popular libraries, its best practices, to interact with its community, to see in what problem domains it shines, etc. I'd say you need to give it more than a year, more than two if you're not doing it on the job. You can churn code much sooner than that obviously, that's not what we are taking about. Nobody does that to see which language is best. And those that do are doing it superficially, writing a hello world or two and then jumping to conclusions. This advice basically makes no sense and yet people keep repeating it.

deleted 7y ago
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