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I'm absolutely baffled by this attitude in literally every single programming language thread in HN. PLT and PL Design don't live in vacuum, it's a vast field

I'm absolutely baffled by this attitude in literally every single programming language thread in HN. PLT and PL Design don't live in vacuum, it's a vast field that has been developing exponentially in the last years (just like any other CS discipline). Any development in Haskell, Rust etc... Or other relatively mainstream frontier languages are fundamentally relevant to any other language's design. Period. All this bickering about "Rust in every thread" is excruciatingly misguided. Lessons we can learn from Rust will be highly influential on other languages and it's worth discussing these. Please keep this in mind before complaining for the 999th time.

metadat 4y ago
It's a common phenomenon on HN, typically referred to as "a casual dismissal".
vlunkr 4y ago
It's fine to compare language design, and it can make for interesting discussion, but that's not what HN has been lately. It's just "Rust is better because it has x feature." If I wanted that level of discourse I'd go to /r/ProgrammerHumor and find the 10,000th "Python is better than Javascript" meme. Is my comment any better? No probably not.
- gnulinux 4y ago
  But this particular chain started as a discussion of how sum types are missed in every other language. Isn't that a very important observation? Every programming language is an experiment: it tests whether an well-defined, particular model of computation ends up having advantages on human engineering results. Maybe it causes fewer bugs. Maybe it makes development faster. Maybe it makes certain features easier to implement. So whether one language has a feature that's highly missed in other languages is the very basis of the debate. I personally am not a Rust programmer, but not knowing Rust, but knowing another programing language that has sum types, it seems understable to me that it worths mentioning this for every language that doesn't have sum types. And when you do do that you might as well mention Rust as an example. (Maybe because it's more mainstream?)

metadat 4y ago

It's a common phenomenon on HN, typically referred to as "a casual dismissal".

vlunkr 4y ago

It's fine to compare language design, and it can make for interesting discussion, but that's not what HN has been lately. It's just "Rust is better because it has x feature." If I wanted that level of discourse I'd go to /r/ProgrammerHumor and find the 10,000th "Python is better than Javascript" meme. Is my comment any better? No probably not.

gnulinux 4y ago
But this particular chain started as a discussion of how sum types are missed in every other language. Isn't that a very important observation? Every programming language is an experiment: it tests whether an well-defined, particular model of computation ends up having advantages on human engineering results. Maybe it causes fewer bugs. Maybe it makes development faster. Maybe it makes certain features easier to implement. So whether one language has a feature that's highly missed in other languages is the very basis of the debate. I personally am not a Rust programmer, but not knowing Rust, but knowing another programing language that has sum types, it seems understable to me that it worths mentioning this for every language that doesn't have sum types. And when you do do that you might as well mention Rust as an example. (Maybe because it's more mainstream?)