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> why would knowing Haskell be an advantage in the task of ensuring safety in Rust My take would be that _any_ language with a heavy emphasis on type oriented
by j-pb 5y ago
> why would knowing Haskell be an advantage in the task of ensuring safety in Rust
My take would be that _any_ language with a heavy emphasis on type oriented programming would be a good primer for a systems programming language which uses its type system as it's primary means of ensuring safety.
Haskel is just the best known / most widely used(?) of the bunch.
But even if you include other type-driven languages, OPs point remains in that the typical Rust dev either has a C++ or Scripting language background, without a strong theoretical foundation.
- steveklabnik 5y ago> OPs point remains in that the typical Rust dev either has a C++ or Scripting language background, without a strong theoretical foundation. You may be conflating Rust users with the Rust developers. Several of the people involved, including Niko Matsakis (co-lead of the language team, who invented the borrow checker), Felix Klock (co-lead of the compiler team), and Ralf Jung (whose work is the paper above, among other things, and has been focused on specifying/proving unsafe Rust for the last few years) have PhDs in programming language topics. And even folks without formal credentials refer to existing academic works when talking about building Rust. Heck, we even used to ship a bibliography of papers! https://doc.rust-lang.org/1.30.0/book/first-edition/bibliography.html https://doc.rust-lang.org/1.30.0/book/first-edition/bibliogr...
- Dylan16807 5y agoI don't think that's conflation, really. When I say "[programming language] dev" I always mean the people that program using that language, not the people that make the language.
- steveklabnik 5y agoI would agree, but that’s why it’s the wrong group to look at; if you’re going to claim that the language lacks theoretical foundation because the people who use it don’t have one, that’s a category error.