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That's not really consistent with my experience in the Rust community at all. Memes aside, rewrites for the sake of rewrites are typically discouraged. When l

That's not really consistent with my experience in the Rust community at all. Memes aside, rewrites for the sake of rewrites are typically discouraged. When language comparisons are made, they tend to clearly highlight objective and subjective pros/cons. In particular, the referenced AWS article is typically called out as a bad "study" Maybe it was different a few years ago, but this is what I've seen since late 2019ish.

mohanmcgeek 5y ago
Rewrites for the sake of rewrites is a HN thing. This used to happen with other languages too. In 2015, Front page posts on a given day would have "xyz in Go" and it was JavaScript before that. People tend to reimplement systems they know in languages they are learning and it's perfectly alright. But, these are engineers at huge companies rewriting core system components for dubious reasons AND writing a deliberately misleading blog post about it. Now more engineers with an agenda would cite these posts to their managers and get their rewrites.
- lanstin 5y ago
  Rewriting a small thing you know well is a fabulous way to understand the new language, because your focus isn't on "what should the code do" but "how do I make the code do this thing." I've had senior tech leadership explain that rewriting a big system into a new language is done because the real goal is to rewrite the old system that no one understands well enough and is gradually becoming scary to change; people are enthused for the shiny new language, and at the end the current organization understands this crucial system for a few more years. People in companies write the blog posts because it helps get promotions ("visibility" "industry leadership").
  - mohanmcgeek 5y ago
    > People in companies write the blog posts because it helps get promotions ("visibility" "industry leadership"). This is definitely toxic work culture that needs to be fixed
- mcronce 5y ago
  I wouldn't actually characterize "Wordle in Rust", "xyz in Go", etc for the sake of learning a language as "rewrites for the sake of rewrites", though - I would characterize them as rewrites for the sake of learning and there's nothing wrong with that. Coming up with a new idea and implementing it with technology you don't know is a lot harder than implementing an existing idea. Blog posts about them are often interesting simply because you get a new perspective on the tools you use frequently. I'm talking about the types of things where a rewrite is done not for the purpose of learning, or because a specific set of issues is identified in the existing project, etc...but because "this language is better so I'm rewriting X in it"
- jerf 5y ago
  "In 2015, Front page posts on a given day would have "xyz in Go" and it was JavaScript before that." I use the prevalence of "In X" posts as a sneaky measure of maturity of the given language. A language is "mature" when people start posting projects written in it on HN without highlighting the implementation language. Rust & Go have both hit this, BTW. But only a couple of years ago, and you can still definitely see "In Rust/Go" posts with some regularity, so they haven't hit full maturity, where it wouldn't even cross the mind of a poster to mention Rust or Go as if it were a weird thing.

mohanmcgeek 5y ago

Rewrites for the sake of rewrites is a HN thing. This used to happen with other languages too. In 2015, Front page posts on a given day would have "xyz in Go" and it was JavaScript before that. People tend to reimplement systems they know in languages they are learning and it's perfectly alright. But, these are engineers at huge companies rewriting core system components for dubious reasons AND writing a deliberately misleading blog post about it. Now more engineers with an agenda would cite these posts to their managers and get their rewrites.

lanstin 5y ago
Rewriting a small thing you know well is a fabulous way to understand the new language, because your focus isn't on "what should the code do" but "how do I make the code do this thing." I've had senior tech leadership explain that rewriting a big system into a new language is done because the real goal is to rewrite the old system that no one understands well enough and is gradually becoming scary to change; people are enthused for the shiny new language, and at the end the current organization understands this crucial system for a few more years. People in companies write the blog posts because it helps get promotions ("visibility" "industry leadership").
- mohanmcgeek 5y ago
  > People in companies write the blog posts because it helps get promotions ("visibility" "industry leadership"). This is definitely toxic work culture that needs to be fixed
mcronce 5y ago
I wouldn't actually characterize "Wordle in Rust", "xyz in Go", etc for the sake of learning a language as "rewrites for the sake of rewrites", though - I would characterize them as rewrites for the sake of learning and there's nothing wrong with that. Coming up with a new idea and implementing it with technology you don't know is a lot harder than implementing an existing idea. Blog posts about them are often interesting simply because you get a new perspective on the tools you use frequently. I'm talking about the types of things where a rewrite is done not for the purpose of learning, or because a specific set of issues is identified in the existing project, etc...but because "this language is better so I'm rewriting X in it"
jerf 5y ago
"In 2015, Front page posts on a given day would have "xyz in Go" and it was JavaScript before that." I use the prevalence of "In X" posts as a sneaky measure of maturity of the given language. A language is "mature" when people start posting projects written in it on HN without highlighting the implementation language. Rust & Go have both hit this, BTW. But only a couple of years ago, and you can still definitely see "In Rust/Go" posts with some regularity, so they haven't hit full maturity, where it wouldn't even cross the mind of a poster to mention Rust or Go as if it were a weird thing.