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Something about your Ada post was rubbing me the wrong way, and I figured it out. I'm not trying to be negative or insulting or anything like that, and I'm not

Something about your Ada post was rubbing me the wrong way, and I figured it out. I'm not trying to be negative or insulting or anything like that, and I'm not trying to make it personal since I think this observation is not limited to you but is endemic in software development, but I don't know a better way to phrase this. The fact that the man who literally wrote the book on what is supposed to be the future of memory safe software engineering is not an expert on the past/current state of the art is deeply concerning. Rust is a large collaborative project that has explicitly avoided having a BDFL, and maybe there are others involved with deeper expertise in the existing state of the art in memory safe languages. Maybe the problem Rust is trying to solve is fundamentally new, but I'm skeptical of that. For all the projects out there that casually look as if they are reinventing the wheel, I wish part of their communication would be to frame themselves in terms of what came before and explain why they are different or why the world has changed or why what came before got something crucial wrong.

steveklabnik 5y ago
Still dodging my questions ;) I think there's a few ways to tease apart what you're saying here. First of all, I think that, even if we take this at face value: > The fact that the man who literally wrote the book on what is supposed to be the future of memory safe software engineering is not an expert on the past/current state of the art is deeply concerning. Not having tons of practical experience with one language is not the same as "not an expert on the past/current state of the art." I am a student of programming language history, I just hadn't spent a ton of time with Ada specifically. There are a lot of programming languages out there, and unless that is your sole focus, you'll miss some. That being said, Graydon is that kind of person, and as far as I can tell, knows everything about every language. While he hasn't been involved in Rust for a while, and Rust looked very different back when he started it, that knowledge was expressly there. > I wish part of their communication would be to frame themselves in terms of what came before and explain why they are different I mean, we have. "memory safety without garbage collection" was our slogan for a very long time. While Ada does have many mitigations here, fundamentally, heap allocation is unchecked, and can cause double-frees or use after frees. SPARK does give you memory saftey, but does this by being an aggressive subset that, as far as I know, doesn't let you use dynamic allocation or pointers at all. But, moreover, it is true that we do not often compare ourselves to other languages directly. This is more of a cultural issue than anything else. Programming languages are very tribal, and even well-meaning comparisons can come across as very aggressive. We don't discourage people making these kinds of comparisons themselves, but as a project, we prefer to talk about what Rust can do, rather than about what other languages can't do. These social reasons blend into technical reasons; programming language cultures that become obsessed with talking about why they're better than others often miss out on the good parts of those other languages. In the end, I think we get better cross-pollination with other languages by not explicitly comparing and contrasting with them in our public-facing marketing. Comparisons, in, say, an RFC are fantastic. These often do get made. But that's internal facing communication, not external.
- blacktriangle 5y ago
  If you want numbers, it's sadly more like Stewart's "I know it when I see it" comment. But I think we're also talking about reaching different bars. My comment was in reaction to jolux's assertion that those exploring other solutions to safety are acting in an irresponsible, unprofessional, and unethical manner. I've been digging into Zig and Ada on the side for personal projects, and thus spending time on their respective reddits and forums. And dealing with the Rust zealots trolling these communities is verging on intolerable. Like you point out, "Why Reddit is like this" is a whole other issue, but there's a reason people are reflexively defensive. This issue comes up in the content of the podcast under discussion as well. So my bar in this case was the point where we should converge on some single solution, which I don't think is representative of Rust's official stance, but it is an issue with Rust's larger informal community. Or maybe it's just a problem with Reddit and HN. The bar I suspect you are talking about is more along the lines of should people be using Rust in production, and clearly Rust has reached that point. People with far more at stake than I have are successfully using Rust in production, and that is a necessary step forward to things like a formal standard and multiple implementations. Your point around the outward facing marketing is interesting. It's a shame and I don't think it speaks well of us as in industry that we tend to be so tribal around discussing the deficiency and comparisons of our tools, but I can see where the idea to focus on what your own project can do is more effective messaging. Its interesting how that kind of ties back to this post https://steveklabnik.com/writing/rust-is-more-than-safety https://steveklabnik.com/writing/rust-is-more-than-safety in which you dig into some of the issues marketing Rust. FWIW you now have me wondering the same question of why does Zig deserve to exist when Ada exists as well and start to see if I can put together a decent comparison to understand the spaces they all function in.

steveklabnik 5y ago

Still dodging my questions ;) I think there's a few ways to tease apart what you're saying here. First of all, I think that, even if we take this at face value: > The fact that the man who literally wrote the book on what is supposed to be the future of memory safe software engineering is not an expert on the past/current state of the art is deeply concerning. Not having tons of practical experience with one language is not the same as "not an expert on the past/current state of the art." I am a student of programming language history, I just hadn't spent a ton of time with Ada specifically. There are a lot of programming languages out there, and unless that is your sole focus, you'll miss some. That being said, Graydon is that kind of person, and as far as I can tell, knows everything about every language. While he hasn't been involved in Rust for a while, and Rust looked very different back when he started it, that knowledge was expressly there. > I wish part of their communication would be to frame themselves in terms of what came before and explain why they are different I mean, we have. "memory safety without garbage collection" was our slogan for a very long time. While Ada does have many mitigations here, fundamentally, heap allocation is unchecked, and can cause double-frees or use after frees. SPARK does give you memory saftey, but does this by being an aggressive subset that, as far as I know, doesn't let you use dynamic allocation or pointers at all. But, moreover, it is true that we do not often compare ourselves to other languages directly. This is more of a cultural issue than anything else. Programming languages are very tribal, and even well-meaning comparisons can come across as very aggressive. We don't discourage people making these kinds of comparisons themselves, but as a project, we prefer to talk about what Rust can do, rather than about what other languages can't do. These social reasons blend into technical reasons; programming language cultures that become obsessed with talking about why they're better than others often miss out on the good parts of those other languages. In the end, I think we get better cross-pollination with other languages by not explicitly comparing and contrasting with them in our public-facing marketing. Comparisons, in, say, an RFC are fantastic. These often do get made. But that's internal facing communication, not external.

blacktriangle 5y ago
If you want numbers, it's sadly more like Stewart's "I know it when I see it" comment. But I think we're also talking about reaching different bars. My comment was in reaction to jolux's assertion that those exploring other solutions to safety are acting in an irresponsible, unprofessional, and unethical manner. I've been digging into Zig and Ada on the side for personal projects, and thus spending time on their respective reddits and forums. And dealing with the Rust zealots trolling these communities is verging on intolerable. Like you point out, "Why Reddit is like this" is a whole other issue, but there's a reason people are reflexively defensive. This issue comes up in the content of the podcast under discussion as well. So my bar in this case was the point where we should converge on some single solution, which I don't think is representative of Rust's official stance, but it is an issue with Rust's larger informal community. Or maybe it's just a problem with Reddit and HN. The bar I suspect you are talking about is more along the lines of should people be using Rust in production, and clearly Rust has reached that point. People with far more at stake than I have are successfully using Rust in production, and that is a necessary step forward to things like a formal standard and multiple implementations. Your point around the outward facing marketing is interesting. It's a shame and I don't think it speaks well of us as in industry that we tend to be so tribal around discussing the deficiency and comparisons of our tools, but I can see where the idea to focus on what your own project can do is more effective messaging. Its interesting how that kind of ties back to this post https://steveklabnik.com/writing/rust-is-more-than-safety https://steveklabnik.com/writing/rust-is-more-than-safety in which you dig into some of the issues marketing Rust. FWIW you now have me wondering the same question of why does Zig deserve to exist when Ada exists as well and start to see if I can put together a decent comparison to understand the spaces they all function in.