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Interesting write up. I've written zero Rust and only a few toy examples in Zig. I do write quite a bit of straight C on microcontrollers. "...every time I use

Interesting write up. I've written zero Rust and only a few toy examples in Zig. I do write quite a bit of straight C on microcontrollers. "...every time I use Rust on a new project, I run into some issue that forces me to confront a new corner of the language/ecosystem." This was the tour de force comment for me. This is how I feel about web programming, Swift, growingly so about Kotlin. I figure you can use Rust as a mutable variable for many of the "new languages" for developers to use. We didn't have time to write you a short language, so we wrote you a complex one instead. Reminds of laws in Congress these days.

augustk 6y ago
This reminds me of a passage in The BlackBox Framework about Niklaus Wirth's approach to language design: "Wirth’s philosophy of programming languages is that a complex language is not required to solve a complex problem. On the contrary, he believes that languages containing complex features whose purposes are to solve complex problems actually hinder the problem solving effort. The idea is that it is difficult enough for a programmer to solve a complex problem without having to also cope with the complexity of the language. Having a simple programming language as a tool reduces the total complexity of the problem to be solved."