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Is it really boring that you have to learn 20 different features to do 20 different things? There is a certain economy at play with feature sets that the author

Is it really boring that you have to learn 20 different features to do 20 different things? There is a certain economy at play with feature sets that the author brings up that has nothing to do with "boring" or not; having to learn a ton of different things and always feeling like there's probably some tailor-made thing you should be using for exactly your problem is not boring, it's just less productive when working.

littlestymaar 6y ago
You're missing the point here: I meant “boring” as “it's been six years already, we want new toys”. The more it ages and gains adoption (which really skyrocketed in the past two years), the less “cool” Rust will be. You cannot be “cool” and “mainstream” at the same time.
- 59nadir 6y ago
  I don't disagree about any of what you said here in isolation, but I'm not sure that the complaints that the author has stem from Rust being inherently more popular. Sure, adding features is generally a sign that you're trying to capture/retain users (I recently learned that weak equality operators were added to JavaScript for this exact reason and Brendan Eich regrets it *a lot*), but at the same time it feels like things could be more cohesive than they are. But yeah, I agree that hype trains lose momentum when things become more common. With that said, I don't really feel like Rust is popular/common enough to lose hype. Basically no one uses it in production in comparison to the obvious alternatives and it'd be a bit odd for it to lose hype so soon.
  - littlestymaar 6y ago
    > but I'm not sure that the complaints that the author has stem from Rust being inherently more popular. These complaints made the top of HN today, not 5 years ago (when Rust for embedded was way less mature and convenient), for a good reason. And notice that this person isn't advocating that Rust is too complex and you should keep using proven tech like C or Python for doing real stuff, they are advocating using a brand new experimental language, with a radical new design, whose compiler keeps crashing and which still makes breaking changes every once in a while[1]. This specific article is a really good illustration of the hype train moving on. > but at the same time it feels like things could be more cohesive than they are. The Rust team attempt to make the feature as cohesive as possible (and compared to a language like C++, they are doing a pretty good job at it) but nothing is perfect. I'm curious if you have specific examples of features that you don't think are cohesive though. (One example I can think of is the old `macro_rule!` vs procedural macros, but maybe there are others). > With that said, I don't really feel like Rust is popular/common enough to lose hype. Basically no one uses it in production in comparison to the obvious alternatives and it'd be a bit odd for it to lose hype so soon. Hype is a multi-level thing: the Rust hype is still growing (it still makes the front page of HN almost every day), but the most avant-garde hackers are moving away from it. That's nothing unexpected. [1]: I'm not bashing Zig in any way, nobody expect such a recent language to be polished already! [2]: https://medium.com/code-adventures/farewell-node-js-4ba9e7f3e52b https://medium.com/code-adventures/farewell-node-js-4ba9e7f3...

littlestymaar 6y ago

You're missing the point here: I meant “boring” as “it's been six years already, we want new toys”. The more it ages and gains adoption (which really skyrocketed in the past two years), the less “cool” Rust will be. You cannot be “cool” and “mainstream” at the same time.

59nadir 6y ago
I don't disagree about any of what you said here in isolation, but I'm not sure that the complaints that the author has stem from Rust being inherently more popular. Sure, adding features is generally a sign that you're trying to capture/retain users (I recently learned that weak equality operators were added to JavaScript for this exact reason and Brendan Eich regrets it *a lot*), but at the same time it feels like things could be more cohesive than they are. But yeah, I agree that hype trains lose momentum when things become more common. With that said, I don't really feel like Rust is popular/common enough to lose hype. Basically no one uses it in production in comparison to the obvious alternatives and it'd be a bit odd for it to lose hype so soon.
- littlestymaar 6y ago
  > but I'm not sure that the complaints that the author has stem from Rust being inherently more popular. These complaints made the top of HN today, not 5 years ago (when Rust for embedded was way less mature and convenient), for a good reason. And notice that this person isn't advocating that Rust is too complex and you should keep using proven tech like C or Python for doing real stuff, they are advocating using a brand new experimental language, with a radical new design, whose compiler keeps crashing and which still makes breaking changes every once in a while[1]. This specific article is a really good illustration of the hype train moving on. > but at the same time it feels like things could be more cohesive than they are. The Rust team attempt to make the feature as cohesive as possible (and compared to a language like C++, they are doing a pretty good job at it) but nothing is perfect. I'm curious if you have specific examples of features that you don't think are cohesive though. (One example I can think of is the old `macro_rule!` vs procedural macros, but maybe there are others). > With that said, I don't really feel like Rust is popular/common enough to lose hype. Basically no one uses it in production in comparison to the obvious alternatives and it'd be a bit odd for it to lose hype so soon. Hype is a multi-level thing: the Rust hype is still growing (it still makes the front page of HN almost every day), but the most avant-garde hackers are moving away from it. That's nothing unexpected. [1]: I'm not bashing Zig in any way, nobody expect such a recent language to be polished already! [2]: https://medium.com/code-adventures/farewell-node-js-4ba9e7f3e52b https://medium.com/code-adventures/farewell-node-js-4ba9e7f3...