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Having an international standard behind a language gives it a certain weight that can't even be compared to the ad-hoc structures that are seen in other project
by blub 6y ago
Having an international standard behind a language gives it a certain weight that can't even be compared to the ad-hoc structures that are seen in other projects.
It enables experts in different areas from different countries to come and work together under a set of specific rules that are much stronger that words written in wikis or repos. It also makes it clear that the language is designed for the long term and is not under the control of a single party (as was the concern about e.g. Mozilla which the Rust community tried so hard to dispel).
It avoids embarrassing transitions like Python's 2->3 or one corporation taking control of a language like Oracle did with Java by simply buying it. It avoids having to watch a language go extinct because its corporate sponsor wishes it so (Objective-C, VB 6) and many other such unpleasantness.
This is partly why this AWS focus is strange to say the least. I would have thought that it's obvious for the Rust community that having one large sponsor is not healthy. This tells me that Rust was never really as independent from Mozilla as claimed and Mozilla refocusing away from it seriously hurt the language.
- oblio 6y agoYet Python and Java have been around for 30+/25+ years and are some of the most popular languages around. Not many people care about standardization, it seems.
- tannhaeuser 6y agoI don't care so much about standardization as about choice, though, which is what standards tend to create, or the formation of standardization bodies tend to document. C is simple enough to create a compiler from scratch in less than a year (as proven by Tiny CC), but sinking your precious time into a behemoth like Rust (or other language-to-rule-em-all with open research problems) is on another level altogether in terms of commitment. As the language hasn't finalized, can change at any time, only people with inside knowledge of Rust will be able to work on such projects. Others will have to take a significant risk of their Rust code base becoming obsolete, or Rust simply imploding due to lack of new devs outside the inner circle able to pickup. Which makes Rust an irrational choice in the presence of alternatives.
- oblio 6y agoI find the Rust complexity comment quite funny in a world where C++ and Perl 5 are around and they even managed to release Perl 6 :-)
- lizmat 6y agoYes, that's almost 5 years ago now. But please note that since then, it has been renamed to Raku (https://raku.org https://raku.org using the #rakulang tag on social media). You can check out the Rakudo Weekly News (https://rakudoweekly.blog/blog-feed/ https://rakudoweekly.blog/blog-feed/) if you want to stay up-to-date on developments.
- oblio 6y agoDo you have some sort of Perl 6 alert for HN? :-p I know that it's been renamed, but I think you agree that it's still a very complex and powerful language.
- blub 6y agoIt's logical to be concerned about complexity in a specific thing even if there are other complex things in the world. That should be self-evident.
- oblio 6y agoYeah, but his argument was directly coming from a C/C++ perspective, which makes it at least a bit... strange.
- tannhaeuser 6y agoI was comparing directly against C. There's no such thing as "C/C++".
- blub 6y agoOne doesn't need standardized tools to get things done. One doesn't even need correctness, performance, privacy, etc as can be seen from a multitude of very successful projects. But it's there for those that really need it and personally I like it because it shows what we can achieve when a massive group of experts from all over the planet gets together and they nurture a project over many decades which has to work for such a broad set of use cases under the most strict and diverse of requirements, from avionics to mobile apps, physics simulations to cutting edge video games, medical devices to smartwatches and so on. These two languages have contributed so much to what we have achieved and they're part of our digital heritage. Maybe that's another reason that they had to be standardized, so that they belong to everyone. :-)
- pjmlp 6y agoJava has a standardization process, it just happens not to be ISO, it is still driven by multiple companies and at each release written documentation comes out. https://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/index.html https://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/index.html https://openjdk.java.net/jeps/1 https://openjdk.java.net/jeps/1
- anp 6y ago> one large sponsor Where is this coming from? I’m also worried about AWS over-representation in the Rust community but they’re far from the only significant corporate sponsors at this point.