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“Well thought out languages with rigorous semantic descriptions” never win because those are mostly meaningless metrics. The ability to get things done and the

by orf 5y ago

“Well thought out languages with rigorous semantic descriptions” never win because those are mostly meaningless metrics. The ability to get things done and the barrier to entry are the only metrics that count. See: JavaScript. While Rust is well thought out it’s killer feature is it’s the somewhat unique ability to allow people to get things done relatively quickly (sometimes/often with the expressiveness you’d expect from Ruby or Python) whilst also offering gigantic correctness guarantees and a (initially) low barrier to entry. But hey, Zig has a reference document. Watch out World!

lmm 5y ago
> “Well thought out languages with rigorous semantic descriptions” never win because those are mostly meaningless metrics. The ability to get things done and the barrier to entry are the only metrics that count. Perl was successful for a time but its messiness eventually caught up to it. OCaml is of the same vintage and grew much more slowly but I dare say it has a brighter future.
- IshKebab 5y ago
  I don't think Rust is messy in the same way Perl is simply because nobody has written a formal specification.
  - nyanpasu64 5y ago
    Unsafe Rust, the undecided interactions between &mut and raw pointers and Pin (whether &mut should invalidate raw pointers permanently or until the &mut ends, whether Pin<&mut T> should be noalias), whether Vec is marked noalias (it isn't) or Box should be (it is), is a mess of undecided semantics that people are nonetheless writing code that hopefully won't be declared illegal in a future compiler version.
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      The scope of noalias semantics can be formalized quite precisely by using separation logic, which can also act as a simpler and more elegant foundation for Rust's reference semantics and the so-called borrow-checker. Future editions of Rust will probably do this at some point in order to gain these benefits.

by orf 5y ago

lmm 5y ago

> “Well thought out languages with rigorous semantic descriptions” never win because those are mostly meaningless metrics. The ability to get things done and the barrier to entry are the only metrics that count. Perl was successful for a time but its messiness eventually caught up to it. OCaml is of the same vintage and grew much more slowly but I dare say it has a brighter future.

IshKebab 5y ago
I don't think Rust is messy in the same way Perl is simply because nobody has written a formal specification.
- nyanpasu64 5y ago
  Unsafe Rust, the undecided interactions between &mut and raw pointers and Pin (whether &mut should invalidate raw pointers permanently or until the &mut ends, whether Pin<&mut T> should be noalias), whether Vec is marked noalias (it isn't) or Box should be (it is), is a mess of undecided semantics that people are nonetheless writing code that hopefully won't be declared illegal in a future compiler version.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    The scope of noalias semantics can be formalized quite precisely by using separation logic, which can also act as a simpler and more elegant foundation for Rust's reference semantics and the so-called borrow-checker. Future editions of Rust will probably do this at some point in order to gain these benefits.