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Any software where you will need to develop serious things for will suck. Almost nobody feels miserable in languages like python because they rarely have to de

Any software where you will need to develop serious things for will suck. Almost nobody feels miserable in languages like python because they rarely have to deal with the ugly stuff or having people depending their lives on it. Thats the 50% of the fun writing in it, because you will deal mostly with the cool things, and who would not like the language that gives you that kind of pleasure? And the languages that are used for this kind of stuff will suck somehow, because its hard to make things right on them, it requires a lot of discipline and you will have to deal with big codebases, in big teams.. so the things gets much harder to do right. The guy that is chearing Rust today, is the guy that will complain 10 years from now, how Rust sucks, because he have to deal with it everyday in its big avionics codebase and any mistake can cost million of dollars or peoples lives. Its psychology. We need the shiny new thing to give more meaning to our lives. It will never stop, but with time you learn to navigate over it a little better. There is very little change in languages now, and once someone does a real paradigm shift, it will be impossible to ignore.

tluyben2 6y ago
> The guy that is cheering Rust today, is the guy that will complain 10 years from now, how Rust sucks, because he have to deal with it everyday in its big avionics codebase and any mistake can cost million of dollars or peoples lives. I do believe (not as a religion, but based on the progress made with languages like Rust, Idris, Haskell, Typescript etc) that the trend towards provable/robust safeness will continue in the coming 10 years. Progress is slow, but it is there and the libraries + proof assistants (possibly AI assisted) will improve. Somehow that will find it's way in one or more of the languages we are using now (because shiny new things). Anyway; I don't have that feeling, at all, about languages and codebases I have been using for 1 or more decades; c, c#, php, java, pascal, perl (only exception is JS; it was awful 10+ years ago and I do like to complain about that but I maintain only 1 significant codebase in 'older' js (about 8 years ago?); it is a (callback hell) nightmare, currently being rewritten in c#); I work on significant sized codebases in all of these and they work fine (no money lost, no people died (no avionics either though, but still enough opportunities where people could've died because of something I wrote or was lead on)). > Its psychology. We need the shiny new thing to give more meaning to our lives. 'We need' => maybe most people do, I don't. I actually never really liked new things. I want stability as my work demands and has demanded that for decades and it creeped into my non-work life. I want things to be reliable and robust 'forever', not new things that I don't know of how good or solid they are (spoiler; they are usually not, in code nor meatspace). I like to pay people, keep my company healthy and sleep at night; shiny new things do the opposite in most cases.
jnxx 6y ago
> Any software where you will need to develop serious things for will suck. Well, "serious things", that is, larger, robust programs need a lot of experience and discipline. This is true in any language and if people do not watch for it their library landscape turns into a hot mess quickly. Take Python. But the thing is, I believe that in many applications, C++ does not make it easier to build serious things. It adds complexity and when working on large-scale stuff, you need extra complexity as much as a hole in the head.

tluyben2 6y ago

> The guy that is cheering Rust today, is the guy that will complain 10 years from now, how Rust sucks, because he have to deal with it everyday in its big avionics codebase and any mistake can cost million of dollars or peoples lives. I do believe (not as a religion, but based on the progress made with languages like Rust, Idris, Haskell, Typescript etc) that the trend towards provable/robust safeness will continue in the coming 10 years. Progress is slow, but it is there and the libraries + proof assistants (possibly AI assisted) will improve. Somehow that will find it's way in one or more of the languages we are using now (because shiny new things). Anyway; I don't have that feeling, at all, about languages and codebases I have been using for 1 or more decades; c, c#, php, java, pascal, perl (only exception is JS; it was awful 10+ years ago and I do like to complain about that but I maintain only 1 significant codebase in 'older' js (about 8 years ago?); it is a (callback hell) nightmare, currently being rewritten in c#); I work on significant sized codebases in all of these and they work fine (no money lost, no people died (no avionics either though, but still enough opportunities where people could've died because of something I wrote or was lead on)). > Its psychology. We need the shiny new thing to give more meaning to our lives. 'We need' => maybe most people do, I don't. I actually never really liked new things. I want stability as my work demands and has demanded that for decades and it creeped into my non-work life. I want things to be reliable and robust 'forever', not new things that I don't know of how good or solid they are (spoiler; they are usually not, in code nor meatspace). I like to pay people, keep my company healthy and sleep at night; shiny new things do the opposite in most cases.

jnxx 6y ago

> Any software where you will need to develop serious things for will suck. Well, "serious things", that is, larger, robust programs need a lot of experience and discipline. This is true in any language and if people do not watch for it their library landscape turns into a hot mess quickly. Take Python. But the thing is, I believe that in many applications, C++ does not make it easier to build serious things. It adds complexity and when working on large-scale stuff, you need extra complexity as much as a hole in the head.