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"early enough in the language" is really worrying at this point. I was there, at Mozilla London office in 2015 15th of May when Rust 1.0 was launched. That was

"early enough in the language" is really worrying at this point. I was there, at Mozilla London office in 2015 15th of May when Rust 1.0 was launched. That was 7 years ago. If you look at the history of languages, 7 years is a point of maturity for those that took off. I really hope Rust doesn't flame out like Scala did.

pdimitar 4y ago
What makes you think it will flame out?
Macha 4y ago
Again though, EJB, AngularJS, Backbone, Pylons were all things in languages that were widely accepted at the times those frameworks were in vogue yet still ran out of steam. Yet Java, JavaScript and Python are still here
- DeathArrow 4y ago
  And C#, C++, C.
ntoskrnl 4y ago
For comparison, Python 1.0 was released in 1994. 7 years later in 2001, Python 2.2 was released. I don't think many of today's popular Python packages date back that far.
- lelanthran 4y ago
  > For comparison, Python 1.0 was released in 1994. 7 years later in 2001, Python 2.2 was released. I don't think many of today's popular Python packages date back that far. Python is an outlier though; it was mostly ignored until very suddenly it took off starting around the time Jupyter released. Most (including I) think it took off due to how easy and accessible it was back then, syntax-wise. You could pick it up and be slightly productive in a day, be extremely productive in a week and essentially master it in a month. Go is following a similar trajectory: productive contributor in a week, master in a month. Rust is in the opposite direction: too many people simply give up on it, those that persevere report months before any reasonable productivity.
  - Macha 4y ago
    Before it's adoption with the scientific community, Python still had a place as "Better perl for scripting" and "Dynamic language for webapps if you don't like Ruby". e.g. Reddit, YouTube and Eve Online are notable apps written in Python before scientific Python was a thing. Reddit and Eve are interesting in being largely stuck with the now-dead platforms they built on too, in the form of web.py and Stackless Python. YouTube I presume the original Python application is gone in favour of a bunch of Go and Java microservices by now. It's interesting as someone who was in the Python for web development camp as Python for scientific computing took off as the two camps were both oblivious to the existence of the other in many cases.
    - DeathArrow 4y ago
      >"Dynamic language for webapps if you don't like Ruby" Wasn't PHP the king of dynamic laguages for Web?
      - Macha 4y ago
        PHP was an earlier era, and certainly continued (to this day even) to be used, but I was thinking more of the Rails era than PHP's peak, which came earlier.
        lelanthran 4y ago
        > PHP was an earlier era, and certainly continued (to this day even) to be used, but I was thinking more of the Rails era than PHP's peak, which came earlier. I don't think Rails/Ruby was ever used more than PHP. IIRC, PHP at its lowest popularity ever is still higher than Rails/Ruby at it's highest popularity ever. The lowest I can recall PHP being at is +-6% (recently). The highest that Rails/Ruby ever got to was <3% (2004/2005/2006).
        DeathArrow 4y ago
        PHP is still used. I don't know if many new apps are written in PHP, or it is used to maintain the large pool of existing PHP apps, but according to Tiobe, Redmonk, PyPl PHP is still widely used.
solar-ice 4y ago
IMO, we're very much past the point at which things have "settled down"... as long as you're not doing web dev or desktop UI dev in Rust. The former will continue to evolve about as fast as JS-land does because it's all web people who have no idea what a sustainable project is, and the latter will take a few more years because nobody has really solved it in any language. (Ask your favourite "cross-platform" desktop UI framework what their accessibility story is; there is one that gets close, it's Qt.) But like, if you're trying to do something you'd otherwise do in C++? Audio/video processing, or something along those lines? Yeah, it's fine. The common libraries you choose today are likely to be maintained going into the future.

pdimitar 4y ago

What makes you think it will flame out?

Macha 4y ago

Again though, EJB, AngularJS, Backbone, Pylons were all things in languages that were widely accepted at the times those frameworks were in vogue yet still ran out of steam. Yet Java, JavaScript and Python are still here

DeathArrow 4y ago
And C#, C++, C.

ntoskrnl 4y ago

For comparison, Python 1.0 was released in 1994. 7 years later in 2001, Python 2.2 was released. I don't think many of today's popular Python packages date back that far.

lelanthran 4y ago
> For comparison, Python 1.0 was released in 1994. 7 years later in 2001, Python 2.2 was released. I don't think many of today's popular Python packages date back that far. Python is an outlier though; it was mostly ignored until very suddenly it took off starting around the time Jupyter released. Most (including I) think it took off due to how easy and accessible it was back then, syntax-wise. You could pick it up and be slightly productive in a day, be extremely productive in a week and essentially master it in a month. Go is following a similar trajectory: productive contributor in a week, master in a month. Rust is in the opposite direction: too many people simply give up on it, those that persevere report months before any reasonable productivity.
- Macha 4y ago
  Before it's adoption with the scientific community, Python still had a place as "Better perl for scripting" and "Dynamic language for webapps if you don't like Ruby". e.g. Reddit, YouTube and Eve Online are notable apps written in Python before scientific Python was a thing. Reddit and Eve are interesting in being largely stuck with the now-dead platforms they built on too, in the form of web.py and Stackless Python. YouTube I presume the original Python application is gone in favour of a bunch of Go and Java microservices by now. It's interesting as someone who was in the Python for web development camp as Python for scientific computing took off as the two camps were both oblivious to the existence of the other in many cases.
  - DeathArrow 4y ago
    >"Dynamic language for webapps if you don't like Ruby" Wasn't PHP the king of dynamic laguages for Web?
    - Macha 4y ago
      PHP was an earlier era, and certainly continued (to this day even) to be used, but I was thinking more of the Rails era than PHP's peak, which came earlier.
      - lelanthran 4y ago
        > PHP was an earlier era, and certainly continued (to this day even) to be used, but I was thinking more of the Rails era than PHP's peak, which came earlier. I don't think Rails/Ruby was ever used more than PHP. IIRC, PHP at its lowest popularity ever is still higher than Rails/Ruby at it's highest popularity ever. The lowest I can recall PHP being at is +-6% (recently). The highest that Rails/Ruby ever got to was <3% (2004/2005/2006).
        DeathArrow 4y ago
        PHP is still used. I don't know if many new apps are written in PHP, or it is used to maintain the large pool of existing PHP apps, but according to Tiobe, Redmonk, PyPl PHP is still widely used.

solar-ice 4y ago

IMO, we're very much past the point at which things have "settled down"... as long as you're not doing web dev or desktop UI dev in Rust. The former will continue to evolve about as fast as JS-land does because it's all web people who have no idea what a sustainable project is, and the latter will take a few more years because nobody has really solved it in any language. (Ask your favourite "cross-platform" desktop UI framework what their accessibility story is; there is one that gets close, it's Qt.) But like, if you're trying to do something you'd otherwise do in C++? Audio/video processing, or something along those lines? Yeah, it's fine. The common libraries you choose today are likely to be maintained going into the future.