3 ms·

aside from the lifetime annotations, how is that worse than C to an unfamiliar reader? the format specifiers for printf and friends are way worse than anything

aside from the lifetime annotations, how is that worse than C to an unfamiliar reader? the format specifiers for printf and friends are way worse than anything in your rust example.

optymizer 6y ago
keeping in mind that this is about syntax, here's what I think is actually worse (but I understand that everyone is different so if you like these, it doesn't really matter what I think): #[] - why the [] if # already makes that line different from the usual code? seems superfluous 'a - is that thing next to 'a' a smudge on my display? Did I forget a quote? better wipe the display with my finger '&a - "mut" and "ref" but ' ? foo! - yelling out function calls. "print!" "exit!" "macro!". Angry Codes! foo? - when you're done yelling, make sure to ask existential questions of the return result. This one I have the least problems with since it actually makes me question the return value ("hm, something's weird here, it could be null, pay attention"), but when coupled with the yelling, just makes the whole thing look dramatic. "do_it_now!(); did_we()?" fn - by itself not a huge deal, but the list of truncated words that are used frequently is "impl", "mut" and "pub". I save some characters (am I really in such a rush?) at the cost of reading this broken English "f-n impl moot pahb". At least C doesn't have that. Pascal had "interface" "implementation", "begin", "end", etc. Java has "public", "interface", "extends", "class". Default for Borrowed - suddenly English! No time to type 'function' or 'mutable' but "Default for Borrowed" is a-ok? underscores all over the place in the standard library. Even C doesn't have that many, mostly in the _r variants that were added. unwrap() - what does that word have to do with errors? (I know what it does) It wouldn't be my first choice. I have a whole list of awesome stuff, meh-stuff and wtf-stuff I noted down about Rust while trying to learn it (on multiple occasions), and there are a lot of excellent things about Rust, but the aesthetics of the language are important, otherwise we'd all have no issues coding in Brainf*ck. Yes it's possible to go nuts with syntax, but this just feels like the "programmer art" of language syntax. I think it's usable (clearly), it's just not elegant to me.
- leetcrew 6y ago
  > #[] - why the [] if # already makes that line different from the usual code? seems superfluous I don't even know what #[bla(foo)] does, or why all that punctuation is needed. maybe nesting is allowed? > 'a - is that thing next to 'a' a smudge on my display? Did I forget a quote? better wipe the display with my finger this is a lifetime annotation, which is a genuinely noisy bit of syntax. > foo! - yelling out function calls. "print!" "exit!" "macro!". Angry Codes! I guess they really want to make sure you know when a macro is being used. probably a result of ptsd from debugging c and c++ code :) > fn - by itself not a huge deal, but the list of truncated words that are used frequently is "impl", "mut" and "pub". I save some characters (am I really in such a rush?) at the cost of reading this broken English "f-n impl moot pahb". At least C doesn't have that. the c keywords aren't too bad, but the standard library is full of this kind of thing. stdio.h and string.h immediately come to mind. I'm not so much defending rust as I am pointing out that c's syntax isn't that great to begin with. I've been writing c and c++ code every day for several years now, so it's usually pretty easy for me to skim and understand what is going on. but if I try and place myself in the shoes of a newcomer, I don't think the syntax is much better than rust. remember the first time you tried to parse the type of a nontrivial function pointer?
- jcranmer 6y ago
  > fn - by itself not a huge deal, but the list of truncated words that are used frequently is "impl", "mut" and "pub". I save some characters (am I really in such a rush?) at the cost of reading this broken English "f-n impl moot pahb". At least C doesn't have that. int and char aren't exactly words. And let's not forget that a type like "double" makes no sense whatsoever by itself. (It's two of something, but two of what? Oh, it's "double-precision" floating point! How could I miss that?) Now, let's look at C's standard library: strcmp, strpbrk, isalnum, ispunct, setjmp, SIGSEGV, SIGFPE (that's the divide-by-zero exception, isn't it obvious?), SIGABRT Sure seems like C has its own massive issue with "we can't let a name be long" > underscores all over the place in the standard library. Even C doesn't have that many, mostly in the _r variants that were added. va_arg, FE_DFL_ENV, int32_t, etc. Continue on into most C libraries, and underscores are pretty common because C has no other namespacing mechanism. Syntax is pretty strange in any language if you're not used to it. If you're comfortable with C, C's syntax and spelling quirks don't stand out to you.

aside from the lifetime annotations, how is that worse than C to an unfamiliar reader? the format specifiers for printf and friends are way worse than anything in your rust example.

optymizer 6y ago

keeping in mind that this is about syntax, here's what I think is actually worse (but I understand that everyone is different so if you like these, it doesn't really matter what I think): #[] - why the [] if # already makes that line different from the usual code? seems superfluous 'a - is that thing next to 'a' a smudge on my display? Did I forget a quote? better wipe the display with my finger '&a - "mut" and "ref" but ' ? foo! - yelling out function calls. "print!" "exit!" "macro!". Angry Codes! foo? - when you're done yelling, make sure to ask existential questions of the return result. This one I have the least problems with since it actually makes me question the return value ("hm, something's weird here, it could be null, pay attention"), but when coupled with the yelling, just makes the whole thing look dramatic. "do_it_now!(); did_we()?" fn - by itself not a huge deal, but the list of truncated words that are used frequently is "impl", "mut" and "pub". I save some characters (am I really in such a rush?) at the cost of reading this broken English "f-n impl moot pahb". At least C doesn't have that. Pascal had "interface" "implementation", "begin", "end", etc. Java has "public", "interface", "extends", "class". Default for Borrowed - suddenly English! No time to type 'function' or 'mutable' but "Default for Borrowed" is a-ok? underscores all over the place in the standard library. Even C doesn't have that many, mostly in the _r variants that were added. unwrap() - what does that word have to do with errors? (I know what it does) It wouldn't be my first choice. I have a whole list of awesome stuff, meh-stuff and wtf-stuff I noted down about Rust while trying to learn it (on multiple occasions), and there are a lot of excellent things about Rust, but the aesthetics of the language are important, otherwise we'd all have no issues coding in Brainf*ck. Yes it's possible to go nuts with syntax, but this just feels like the "programmer art" of language syntax. I think it's usable (clearly), it's just not elegant to me.

leetcrew 6y ago
> #[] - why the [] if # already makes that line different from the usual code? seems superfluous I don't even know what #[bla(foo)] does, or why all that punctuation is needed. maybe nesting is allowed? > 'a - is that thing next to 'a' a smudge on my display? Did I forget a quote? better wipe the display with my finger this is a lifetime annotation, which is a genuinely noisy bit of syntax. > foo! - yelling out function calls. "print!" "exit!" "macro!". Angry Codes! I guess they really want to make sure you know when a macro is being used. probably a result of ptsd from debugging c and c++ code :) > fn - by itself not a huge deal, but the list of truncated words that are used frequently is "impl", "mut" and "pub". I save some characters (am I really in such a rush?) at the cost of reading this broken English "f-n impl moot pahb". At least C doesn't have that. the c keywords aren't too bad, but the standard library is full of this kind of thing. stdio.h and string.h immediately come to mind. I'm not so much defending rust as I am pointing out that c's syntax isn't that great to begin with. I've been writing c and c++ code every day for several years now, so it's usually pretty easy for me to skim and understand what is going on. but if I try and place myself in the shoes of a newcomer, I don't think the syntax is much better than rust. remember the first time you tried to parse the type of a nontrivial function pointer?
jcranmer 6y ago
> fn - by itself not a huge deal, but the list of truncated words that are used frequently is "impl", "mut" and "pub". I save some characters (am I really in such a rush?) at the cost of reading this broken English "f-n impl moot pahb". At least C doesn't have that. int and char aren't exactly words. And let's not forget that a type like "double" makes no sense whatsoever by itself. (It's two of something, but two of what? Oh, it's "double-precision" floating point! How could I miss that?) Now, let's look at C's standard library: strcmp, strpbrk, isalnum, ispunct, setjmp, SIGSEGV, SIGFPE (that's the divide-by-zero exception, isn't it obvious?), SIGABRT Sure seems like C has its own massive issue with "we can't let a name be long" > underscores all over the place in the standard library. Even C doesn't have that many, mostly in the _r variants that were added. va_arg, FE_DFL_ENV, int32_t, etc. Continue on into most C libraries, and underscores are pretty common because C has no other namespacing mechanism. Syntax is pretty strange in any language if you're not used to it. If you're comfortable with C, C's syntax and spelling quirks don't stand out to you.