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> Why do people spend so much energy shooting down a language nobody uses? If you don’t like it you don’t have to use it. Because this language isn't made by a

by jmmv 4y ago

> Why do people spend so much energy shooting down a language nobody uses? If you don’t like it you don’t have to use it. Because this language isn't made by a nobody. It's made by a popular person with a following, so the language _will_ get used by a non-insignificant number of people. And those people _will_ (re)implement all the things that you want a language to have (database connections, networking libraries, (de)serialization libraries, etc.). And these things, which can be performance/security-critical, will be impacted by the issues people are pointing out. Once we reach this plausible scenario, it's likely that some software that you want to use on, say, your server, will depend on those libraries. And _then_, like it or not, _you_ will be impacted by the choices of the language and be subject to whichever bugs all those people made when reimplementing (in this case) hash tables. We could assume that everyone writing libraries in this language will be an expert and not make mistakes, but that is just a non-starter. In a sufficiently-large ecosystem, the people writing code will come from all sorts of backgrounds and have all levels of expertise, so you _will_ get buggy code in important libraries, and those bugs are the stuff most CVEs are made of nowadays. I get with what you are saying that people are free to develop a language as they choose, and I agree with you there---I'm building my own and it's _not_ a modern language---but there can be consequences in the larger industry, and that's the "scary" part.

sounds 4y ago
But why be the one to shoot it down? If the industry makes mistakes, that's not news.
- Shish2k 4y ago
  Imagine if we’d had the opportunity to complain about PHP or JS back in their early days, and had the opportunity to fix some of their awful decisions _before_ they became practically set in stone?
  - throwaway17_17 4y ago
    There is a distinct difference between PHP, JS and Hare. Hare is being developed and designed with a particular point of view by a developer and early adopters who are passionately supportive of that POV. PHP and JS were both thrown together with minimal direction and to achieve specific goals in as fast a time as possible (if I am remembering both languages begins correctly). It could be possible that another language in the position of JS and PHP at its inception might be amenable to deep and fundamental changes; however, I do not think Hare fits this scenario. If Drew and Co want to make Hare the way it is, awesome! If you don’t want to use share and prefer something else, great!
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      Simply, it is a bad point of view, and deserves discouragement in exact proportion to the amount of promotion it gets. He wants it both ways, and does not deserve that.
      - throwaway17_17 4y ago
        What particularly are you objecting to about Devault’s POV? I mean most of this thread and the article are based on the lack of generic data structures or complaints that Hare is not Rust. The complaint about lack of built-in data structures seems to be focused mostly on developer comfort, with a sprinkling of issues concerning possibility of bugs in implementations of specific structures. With regard to the continual comparisons to Rust, ala ‘memory safety’, if any model of software development outside of Rust’s limited paradigm is ‘bad’ then nearly all code in use today is ‘bad’. That seems to be an unsupportable position in the extreme. I understand some people will not want or value any given piece of software or infrastructure, but the blanket pessimism is not proportional to the alleged detriments proposed by Hare’s mere existence. Maybe I am just being overly sensitive to what I see as over reaction to someone’s programming language preference, but this is the reason I have never, and probably will never, release the language I made and use day to day to the public.
        ncmncm 4y ago
        You cite a list of trivial cavils, which I have no truck with. Hare's problems are much deeper. They stem directly from Drew's fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of software development. Drew is correct that managing complexity is central to the problem of software development. He is 100% wrong on how a programming language can contribute to solving that central problem. There has been a great deal of progress, in the past five decades since C burst on the scene, on managing complexity in programming tasks, with programming language design taking a big bite. Hare adopts exactly none of that success, setting users straight back to the 1970s again. That might have been fine if demands on programmers were no greater than in the 1970s (although the bugginess of software coded then argues otherwise), but anyway we do not live in that world anymore. The programs we want to run don't fit in 64K of RAM and run single-threaded with no network connections, anymore. Where a 1970s language is used for programs today, we all suffer from the failings the language almost unavoidably invites into them. The fundamental insight that Drew has wholly missed is that essential complexity demands more attention to get right than is typically available for one use case. We have learned that pulling complexity into a library component, or (better) a Standard Library component, or failing that a programming language feature, enables attention to be paid to it amortized across all the programs and libraries that depend on it. All the meaningful progress in programming languages since been in finding ways to bring more of what must be expressed into one place so it may be more widely usable, and able to command correspondingly more attention to its performance and correctness. Standard library components in our modern languages successfully remove their complexity from what programmers must manage. The ways we have discovered to help with this process include powerful type systems that have been put to work doing heavy lifting far beyond mere "type checking". We have generics to work with types the way types work with values. Certain languages provide extra tools such as destructors/Drop traits that enable automating resource management. Many languages assert direct responsibility for pieces of that task, imposing borrow checking or GC. There is much left to do. Hare provides exactly none of the tools that have been discovered to encapsulate complexity into carefully correct and generally useful components, or to enable using such a component in all the different places and ways it would be useful. This failing is painfully evident in the library components it does attempt. In the 1970s, Hare might have competed with C and Pascal to express the then newly valued "structured programming". Today it is a toy. Evaluated as a toy, there is nothing wrong with it. But it is not presented as a toy. As a tool for programming in the modern world, it is sorely lacking everywhere that C is sorely lacking, that make C directly responsible for the massive suffering documented in the litany of CVEs, botnets, database exposures, and ransom events.
- klyrs 4y ago
  > But why be the one to shoot it down? It's a very young language. One might consider that early mistakes can be addressed, but only if somebody speaks out about them. I question framing this question as "shooting it down." The project will clearly survive this criticism. The article is by somebody who took the time to learn the language, and will probably continue to invest their time into the language. Criticism of this kind is a gift.
BaculumMeumEst 4y ago
> And those people _will_ (re)implement all the things that you want a language to have (database connections, networking libraries, (de)serialization libraries, etc.). And these things, which can be performance/security-critical, will be impacted by the issues people are pointing out. This language is only available on platforms where you are free to choose whatever software you want. If you think a Hare program is insecure, don't use it.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  Usually we like for replies here to reply what the person above wrote.
- jmmv 4y ago
  What happens when your financial institution or your doctor, whose IT departments run Linux on their servers to handle your personal data, install such insecure software?
  - BaculumMeumEst 4y ago
    The same thing that happens when they use any other insecure software.
gwern 4y ago
I call this 'bitcreep' (https://www.gwern.net/Holy-wars https://www.gwern.net/Holy-wars): the mere existence of a language or library will make coordination harder and gradually impose costs on the rest of the world and form a little bit of a gravity well sucking everyone towards it, for better or worse. If there are network effects and gains from networks, then there are likely anti-network effects and losses from splitting networks...
this_is_eline 4y ago
I don't agree with this. 'Important' software, like something you would want/need for your server, is not 'important' enough if it has a considerable amount of bugs, and therefore _will not_ be used by significant amount of people. (and will not pose a real threat to the community at large). At least not significant enough to explain all the hate authors and contributors are getting. Let's say it's 2030, and I want to host my own matrix server. I would first compile a list of all matrix server implementations, and filter out those with confirmed bugs, and only then choose one (at random or some other criterion). The ones with bugs introduced by some library written in Hare/C/Rust/C++/X language will never be popular enough to even end up on the starting list cause people don't want to use buggy software (at least if there are options and in sufficiently-large ecosystem, there are options). And you might say that those bugs will go unnoticed - yes, but no more unnoticed than any other bug introduced by faulty logic but written in, say, Rust. Also: > so the language _will_ get used by a non-insignificant number of people Hare is fairly opinionated (e.g. it mainly targets FOSS operating systems) so saying that it _will_ be used _just_ as a result of being related to ddevault (a person with a following), is a _wild_ guess. It does not matter how big of a following the author has, if the language itself is bad, it will not get used, or at least, it will get forgotten soon enough. >In a sufficiently-large ecosystem... In a sufficiently-large ecosystem, performance/security-critical software will be created using a language that is used not because of the author's following… Again: if the language itself is bad, it will not get used, or at least, it will get forgotten soon enough. You can write buggy code in _any_ language.

by jmmv 4y ago

sounds 4y ago

But why be the one to shoot it down? If the industry makes mistakes, that's not news.

Shish2k 4y ago
Imagine if we’d had the opportunity to complain about PHP or JS back in their early days, and had the opportunity to fix some of their awful decisions _before_ they became practically set in stone?
- throwaway17_17 4y ago
  There is a distinct difference between PHP, JS and Hare. Hare is being developed and designed with a particular point of view by a developer and early adopters who are passionately supportive of that POV. PHP and JS were both thrown together with minimal direction and to achieve specific goals in as fast a time as possible (if I am remembering both languages begins correctly). It could be possible that another language in the position of JS and PHP at its inception might be amenable to deep and fundamental changes; however, I do not think Hare fits this scenario. If Drew and Co want to make Hare the way it is, awesome! If you don’t want to use share and prefer something else, great!
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    Simply, it is a bad point of view, and deserves discouragement in exact proportion to the amount of promotion it gets. He wants it both ways, and does not deserve that.
    - throwaway17_17 4y ago
      What particularly are you objecting to about Devault’s POV? I mean most of this thread and the article are based on the lack of generic data structures or complaints that Hare is not Rust. The complaint about lack of built-in data structures seems to be focused mostly on developer comfort, with a sprinkling of issues concerning possibility of bugs in implementations of specific structures. With regard to the continual comparisons to Rust, ala ‘memory safety’, if any model of software development outside of Rust’s limited paradigm is ‘bad’ then nearly all code in use today is ‘bad’. That seems to be an unsupportable position in the extreme. I understand some people will not want or value any given piece of software or infrastructure, but the blanket pessimism is not proportional to the alleged detriments proposed by Hare’s mere existence. Maybe I am just being overly sensitive to what I see as over reaction to someone’s programming language preference, but this is the reason I have never, and probably will never, release the language I made and use day to day to the public.
      - ncmncm 4y ago
        You cite a list of trivial cavils, which I have no truck with. Hare's problems are much deeper. They stem directly from Drew's fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of software development. Drew is correct that managing complexity is central to the problem of software development. He is 100% wrong on how a programming language can contribute to solving that central problem. There has been a great deal of progress, in the past five decades since C burst on the scene, on managing complexity in programming tasks, with programming language design taking a big bite. Hare adopts exactly none of that success, setting users straight back to the 1970s again. That might have been fine if demands on programmers were no greater than in the 1970s (although the bugginess of software coded then argues otherwise), but anyway we do not live in that world anymore. The programs we want to run don't fit in 64K of RAM and run single-threaded with no network connections, anymore. Where a 1970s language is used for programs today, we all suffer from the failings the language almost unavoidably invites into them. The fundamental insight that Drew has wholly missed is that essential complexity demands more attention to get right than is typically available for one use case. We have learned that pulling complexity into a library component, or (better) a Standard Library component, or failing that a programming language feature, enables attention to be paid to it amortized across all the programs and libraries that depend on it. All the meaningful progress in programming languages since been in finding ways to bring more of what must be expressed into one place so it may be more widely usable, and able to command correspondingly more attention to its performance and correctness. Standard library components in our modern languages successfully remove their complexity from what programmers must manage. The ways we have discovered to help with this process include powerful type systems that have been put to work doing heavy lifting far beyond mere "type checking". We have generics to work with types the way types work with values. Certain languages provide extra tools such as destructors/Drop traits that enable automating resource management. Many languages assert direct responsibility for pieces of that task, imposing borrow checking or GC. There is much left to do. Hare provides exactly none of the tools that have been discovered to encapsulate complexity into carefully correct and generally useful components, or to enable using such a component in all the different places and ways it would be useful. This failing is painfully evident in the library components it does attempt. In the 1970s, Hare might have competed with C and Pascal to express the then newly valued "structured programming". Today it is a toy. Evaluated as a toy, there is nothing wrong with it. But it is not presented as a toy. As a tool for programming in the modern world, it is sorely lacking everywhere that C is sorely lacking, that make C directly responsible for the massive suffering documented in the litany of CVEs, botnets, database exposures, and ransom events.
klyrs 4y ago
> But why be the one to shoot it down? It's a very young language. One might consider that early mistakes can be addressed, but only if somebody speaks out about them. I question framing this question as "shooting it down." The project will clearly survive this criticism. The article is by somebody who took the time to learn the language, and will probably continue to invest their time into the language. Criticism of this kind is a gift.

BaculumMeumEst 4y ago

> And those people _will_ (re)implement all the things that you want a language to have (database connections, networking libraries, (de)serialization libraries, etc.). And these things, which can be performance/security-critical, will be impacted by the issues people are pointing out. This language is only available on platforms where you are free to choose whatever software you want. If you think a Hare program is insecure, don't use it.

ncmncm 4y ago
Usually we like for replies here to reply what the person above wrote.
jmmv 4y ago
What happens when your financial institution or your doctor, whose IT departments run Linux on their servers to handle your personal data, install such insecure software?
- BaculumMeumEst 4y ago
  The same thing that happens when they use any other insecure software.

gwern 4y ago

I call this 'bitcreep' (https://www.gwern.net/Holy-wars https://www.gwern.net/Holy-wars): the mere existence of a language or library will make coordination harder and gradually impose costs on the rest of the world and form a little bit of a gravity well sucking everyone towards it, for better or worse. If there are network effects and gains from networks, then there are likely anti-network effects and losses from splitting networks...

this_is_eline 4y ago

I don't agree with this. 'Important' software, like something you would want/need for your server, is not 'important' enough if it has a considerable amount of bugs, and therefore _will not_ be used by significant amount of people. (and will not pose a real threat to the community at large). At least not significant enough to explain all the hate authors and contributors are getting. Let's say it's 2030, and I want to host my own matrix server. I would first compile a list of all matrix server implementations, and filter out those with confirmed bugs, and only then choose one (at random or some other criterion). The ones with bugs introduced by some library written in Hare/C/Rust/C++/X language will never be popular enough to even end up on the starting list cause people don't want to use buggy software (at least if there are options and in sufficiently-large ecosystem, there are options). And you might say that those bugs will go unnoticed - yes, but no more unnoticed than any other bug introduced by faulty logic but written in, say, Rust. Also: > so the language _will_ get used by a non-insignificant number of people Hare is fairly opinionated (e.g. it mainly targets FOSS operating systems) so saying that it _will_ be used _just_ as a result of being related to ddevault (a person with a following), is a _wild_ guess. It does not matter how big of a following the author has, if the language itself is bad, it will not get used, or at least, it will get forgotten soon enough. >In a sufficiently-large ecosystem... In a sufficiently-large ecosystem, performance/security-critical software will be created using a language that is used not because of the author's following… Again: if the language itself is bad, it will not get used, or at least, it will get forgotten soon enough. You can write buggy code in _any_ language.