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I've never understood the need to keep code "up to date" with idioms. Most of the time idioms change incrementally; the seismic shifts I can think of a) have ha

I've never understood the need to keep code "up to date" with idioms. Most of the time idioms change incrementally; the seismic shifts I can think of a) have happened pretty much only once in a language's life, and b) were basically an admission that the original language design was bad and/or insufficient in some way. Whereas to me it seems like Rust's idiom changes have mostly been around using some new language feature to make certain cases a bit cleaner; that's about it. They've all been very cohesive and in line with the overarching philosophy, so I don't really see why the old way would look foreign to new developers.

lmkg 6y ago
I think it matters more for reading and collaborating than for writing. If you don't keep up to date with idioms, and your "fluent dialect" is three years out of date, this won't impact your ability to write your own code. But it might pose a barrier if you try to read someone's blog post, or use APIs from recent libraries, or contribute to a newer project. Rust has the obvious seismic shifts like async, which are rare. But the community has a decent amount of "best practice churn" in some areas, like error handling, or async frameworks.
neolog 6y ago
> I've never understood the need to keep code "up to date" with idioms. It helps with readability to have everything using the same idioms, and it helps with quality to have everything using the best idioms. > Most of the time idioms change incrementally Incremental changes stack up over time. > the seismic shifts I can think of a) have happened pretty much only once in a language's life, big changes happen much more often in new ecosystems > and b) were basically an admission that the original language design was bad and/or insufficient in some way. Yeah. If I'm considering whether to join a language, I want to know if they have so many unresolved problems that they're still fixing them all the time. Slowness is related to maturity.

lmkg 6y ago

I think it matters more for reading and collaborating than for writing. If you don't keep up to date with idioms, and your "fluent dialect" is three years out of date, this won't impact your ability to write your own code. But it might pose a barrier if you try to read someone's blog post, or use APIs from recent libraries, or contribute to a newer project. Rust has the obvious seismic shifts like async, which are rare. But the community has a decent amount of "best practice churn" in some areas, like error handling, or async frameworks.

neolog 6y ago

> I've never understood the need to keep code "up to date" with idioms. It helps with readability to have everything using the same idioms, and it helps with quality to have everything using the best idioms. > Most of the time idioms change incrementally Incremental changes stack up over time. > the seismic shifts I can think of a) have happened pretty much only once in a language's life, big changes happen much more often in new ecosystems > and b) were basically an admission that the original language design was bad and/or insufficient in some way. Yeah. If I'm considering whether to join a language, I want to know if they have so many unresolved problems that they're still fixing them all the time. Slowness is related to maturity.