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> But as someone who likes Rust and wants to like it more: don’t lead with that. The original title appears to be “Inside the Pinecone”, but seeing as they sub

> But as someone who likes Rust and wants to like it more: don’t lead with that. The original title appears to be “Inside the Pinecone”, but seeing as they submitted it themselves I’m guessing they wanted the uptick on the Rust. The article itself doesn’t discuss their transition to Rust until the end. So I wouldn’t say they led with it originally, but perhaps didn’t get traction on the original title.

gk1 4y ago
> seeing as they submitted it themselves I'm grateful to muizelaar but I don't know who that is, so we can't take credit for this one.
- bluejekyll 4y ago
  Oh, sorry. I misattributed that. I saw the domain origin and confused that for the submitter. In that case, the submission actually is against the rules of HN, as I understand them (use the original title rule).
benreesman 4y ago
I guess I’m rooting for Rust in the long game sense, which is a different set of imperatives than the hang the hashtag on peripheral stuff sense. I use a lot of great software written in Rust, it’s demonstrably a good vehicle for great software. But too many of its fans are advocates, this can start to seem like an agenda. Don’t take engineering advice from people with an agenda.
- mxkopy 4y ago
  Thank you for pointing this out. Lately I've been getting a culty feeling around Rust which has been turning me off to learning it.
  - fkarg 4y ago
    but it's the same with every hype: there's something at its core and might be worth checking out
    - benreesman 4y ago
      Oh I think a hype like this comes along once or twice in a career. Java was every bit as revolutionary in its day and had Sun Microsystems (they were a Big Deal) pouring every spare dollar into fluff pieces about it and it still never achieved a true Jehovah’s Witness vibe.
      - mwcampbell 4y ago
        Well, Java had at least one aspect of a religion: a purity test. Remember "100% Pure Java" from the late 90s?
        tialaramex 4y ago
        100% Pure Java is because Java is actually about four things. One of those things is a Virtual Machine, which means you don't give a shit that the implementer has never seen an ARM CPU, because you've got the Java VM, and so their code works fine on your ARM CPU. But if their "Java" software is actually 10% i686 Machine Code then that won't run on your ARM CPU, you will need to undertake an expensive port or move to Intel. So hence 100% Pure Java == Write Once / Run Anywhere actually delivered. You can argue that Rust is more than one thing, but certainly not to same extent. Rust's culture is crucial to its "A language empowering everyone..." slogan, but it's not really separate from the programming language, in the way that the Java Virtual Machine doesn't need the Java programming language or the Java security model (now obsolete) or the Java browser plugin (remember that?) and so on.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  - stouset 4y ago
    IMO that "culty feeling" you're getting is the end result of a lot of very experienced engineers encountering Rust, going "holy shit", and trying to preach about it from the rooftops because it feels so much better than the things that have come before it. I find this particularly compelling because Rust generally does not market itself towards novice developers. At least until very recently, I've seen Rust communities actively discourage novices from trying to learn Rust. Not that it's inherently a bad language to learn as one's first, but there just haven't been great resources for people to learn it if they don't already have some previous software experience. The net effect of this is that the enthusiasm you're seeing is coming from a much higher proportion than usual of people who've been in the industry awhile, and not from as many fresh college or bootcamp grads.
    - mxkopy 4y ago
      No, the culty feeling is this paragraph long explanation about how Rust is objectively good, paired with the downvotes I got from saying I feel like Rust is culty. Pretty sure most experienced devs will say "use whatever works, there's some art out there written in erlang/JS/C++" Case in point I think the most valid critique is that Rust is new and lacks a developed ecosystem. As an ML person myself it's not even useful for me to learn Rust unless I want to roll alot of my own stuff. So if your "experienced developers" are preaching about the best languages to promote, to learn as a hobby, etc.. they're not preaching about the best languages for prod unless it's for some specific application. Also, fucking lmao, get over yourself, Rust isn't that hard to learn And even if it were, being able to understand what is essentially wacky C++ doesn't mean you've "been in the industry awhile"
      - stouset 4y ago
        > No, the culty feeling is this paragraph long explanation about how Rust is objectively good So to make sure I have this straight, based on your reply to the sub-thread, your objection is simply that I didn’t repeat the exact reasons why many believe Rust to be an improvement over languages that have come before it? That wasn’t even the damn point of my reply, which was that given the enthusiasm you perceive as cultish behavior, here’s my take on the underlying reason. Something tells me you’d have been even less happy had I launched into a lengthy breakdown of all the comparative advantages. It’s a no-win situation you’ve constructed. Congratulations, I guess? > Pretty sure most experienced devs will say "use whatever works, there's some art out there written in erlang/JS/C++" There’s art in Ruby and I love the language but it’s a terrible choice for long-term projects that grow to large team sizes. A language doesn’t have to completely replace all others to warrant enthusiasm. It doesn’t have to be better along every possible axis to warrant enthusiasm. > Case in point I think the most valid critique is that Rust is new and lacks a developed ecosystem. Ah yes, the favorite criticism of bitter and cynical engineers, right up to the moment they switch to “it’s old and crufty and the industry has moved on”. Oddly, none of these critiques ever seem to apply to the languages of one’s own choosing… > As an ML person myself it's not even useful for me to learn Rust unless I want to roll alot of my own stuff. Nobody anywhere is arguing any language is the best choice for all use-cases. Nobody anywhere is arguing for ML people to rewrite-it-in-rust. These are straw men of your own making. > Also, fucking lmao, get over yourself, Rust isn't that hard to learn More straw men! I literally never said this. Only that the community has made few if any attempts to promote it to complete novices, thus skewing the experience level of those who you do see promoting it (compared to popular languages that do promote themselves to novices). I don’t think Rust is hard to learn, but I do think Rust’s ownership model is hard to truly appreciate if you haven’t spent at least some time in the trenches of languages with manually-managed memory.
  - tene 4y ago
    How would you expect the response to something genuinely better to be different, in a non-culty way?
    - mxkopy 4y ago
      Well there you go, if it's genuinely better it will speak for itself. See when I'm being an apologist I say shit like "Python-like syntax but it compiles to assembly" "You can mess with the AST like in LISP, to make everything differentiable" "You can type the code for 10x speed, or leave it untyped for readability, multiple dispatch is basically magic" You don't see me going around saying "Julia is objectively better" And not only because I don't want to be a cultist but because it isn't and can't be true, something about no free lunch, something about Gödel incompleteness and expressivity, something something...
- dureuill 4y ago
  I mean, it's only natural. I have been using C++, Python and Rust professionally, the developer experience is simply one order of magnitude better with Rust. The tooling is excellent, a sane compilation model brings you a lot, the type system is very helpful. Compared with C++, I measured x3 productivity on writing initial code on a project (sometimes C++ was the rewrite, sometimes Rust was, so not this kind of bias). Compounding maintenance, I expect it to tend to 1 order of magnitude in time. Meanwhile, using Python can sometimes feel magical, but I have to maintain a library written in the language, and I can feel that it hasn't been optimized for this use case. It is terribly hard to keep backward compatibility, adding typing annotations is somewhat useful, but has terrible ergonomics, ensuring no regression is a pain that translates to endless suites of unit tests even for trivial matters ("be your own compiler" will never be a great idea IMO, although tooling like pylance does help a bit). Meanwhile the rearguard is defending for new projects some kind of "No true Scotsman"ish modern C++ delusion, that I am still looking for and that moves like goalposts in every discussion I have with its proponents. My only explanation for the phenomenon is that it is fueled by hubris and sunk cost biases, because my experience with the modern idioms is that while they bring significant improvements, they are still very subpar compared to the expectations brought forth by a modern language, and memory safety related CVEs are still being written everyday in C++. So, what should I do? It is true that, in more than 15 years of coding, Rust represents a revolution in programming in my eyes. Should I sit idly while others are missing on it and someone is wrong on the Internet?
- mwcampbell 4y ago
  I don't believe I've been an over-the-top Rust advocate so far. But I use Rust, I like it so far, and I want to use it more. For me to be able to use it more, it would help if it had the good attributes of a popular language, including a broad ecosystem of libraries and relative ease of hiring developers. So I want Rust to be a popular language. That means winning at the short game. Maybe other Rust advocates have a similar motivation to mine.
- catach 4y ago
  Sometimes an agenda is as simple as "I really like this thing, and I think you'd like it too". I believe this is off-putting primarily due to the mental antibodies people must develop in an advertising-saturated culture. The death of enthusiasm.

gk1 4y ago

> seeing as they submitted it themselves I'm grateful to muizelaar but I don't know who that is, so we can't take credit for this one.

bluejekyll 4y ago
Oh, sorry. I misattributed that. I saw the domain origin and confused that for the submitter. In that case, the submission actually is against the rules of HN, as I understand them (use the original title rule).

benreesman 4y ago

I guess I’m rooting for Rust in the long game sense, which is a different set of imperatives than the hang the hashtag on peripheral stuff sense. I use a lot of great software written in Rust, it’s demonstrably a good vehicle for great software. But too many of its fans are advocates, this can start to seem like an agenda. Don’t take engineering advice from people with an agenda.

mxkopy 4y ago
Thank you for pointing this out. Lately I've been getting a culty feeling around Rust which has been turning me off to learning it.
- fkarg 4y ago
  but it's the same with every hype: there's something at its core and might be worth checking out
  - benreesman 4y ago
    Oh I think a hype like this comes along once or twice in a career. Java was every bit as revolutionary in its day and had Sun Microsystems (they were a Big Deal) pouring every spare dollar into fluff pieces about it and it still never achieved a true Jehovah’s Witness vibe.
    - mwcampbell 4y ago
      Well, Java had at least one aspect of a religion: a purity test. Remember "100% Pure Java" from the late 90s?
      - tialaramex 4y ago
        100% Pure Java is because Java is actually about four things. One of those things is a Virtual Machine, which means you don't give a shit that the implementer has never seen an ARM CPU, because you've got the Java VM, and so their code works fine on your ARM CPU. But if their "Java" software is actually 10% i686 Machine Code then that won't run on your ARM CPU, you will need to undertake an expensive port or move to Intel. So hence 100% Pure Java == Write Once / Run Anywhere actually delivered. You can argue that Rust is more than one thing, but certainly not to same extent. Rust's culture is crucial to its "A language empowering everyone..." slogan, but it's not really separate from the programming language, in the way that the Java Virtual Machine doesn't need the Java programming language or the Java security model (now obsolete) or the Java browser plugin (remember that?) and so on.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- stouset 4y ago
  IMO that "culty feeling" you're getting is the end result of a lot of very experienced engineers encountering Rust, going "holy shit", and trying to preach about it from the rooftops because it feels so much better than the things that have come before it. I find this particularly compelling because Rust generally does not market itself towards novice developers. At least until very recently, I've seen Rust communities actively discourage novices from trying to learn Rust. Not that it's inherently a bad language to learn as one's first, but there just haven't been great resources for people to learn it if they don't already have some previous software experience. The net effect of this is that the enthusiasm you're seeing is coming from a much higher proportion than usual of people who've been in the industry awhile, and not from as many fresh college or bootcamp grads.
  - mxkopy 4y ago
    No, the culty feeling is this paragraph long explanation about how Rust is objectively good, paired with the downvotes I got from saying I feel like Rust is culty. Pretty sure most experienced devs will say "use whatever works, there's some art out there written in erlang/JS/C++" Case in point I think the most valid critique is that Rust is new and lacks a developed ecosystem. As an ML person myself it's not even useful for me to learn Rust unless I want to roll alot of my own stuff. So if your "experienced developers" are preaching about the best languages to promote, to learn as a hobby, etc.. they're not preaching about the best languages for prod unless it's for some specific application. Also, fucking lmao, get over yourself, Rust isn't that hard to learn And even if it were, being able to understand what is essentially wacky C++ doesn't mean you've "been in the industry awhile"
    - stouset 4y ago
      > No, the culty feeling is this paragraph long explanation about how Rust is objectively good So to make sure I have this straight, based on your reply to the sub-thread, your objection is simply that I didn’t repeat the exact reasons why many believe Rust to be an improvement over languages that have come before it? That wasn’t even the damn point of my reply, which was that given the enthusiasm you perceive as cultish behavior, here’s my take on the underlying reason. Something tells me you’d have been even less happy had I launched into a lengthy breakdown of all the comparative advantages. It’s a no-win situation you’ve constructed. Congratulations, I guess? > Pretty sure most experienced devs will say "use whatever works, there's some art out there written in erlang/JS/C++" There’s art in Ruby and I love the language but it’s a terrible choice for long-term projects that grow to large team sizes. A language doesn’t have to completely replace all others to warrant enthusiasm. It doesn’t have to be better along every possible axis to warrant enthusiasm. > Case in point I think the most valid critique is that Rust is new and lacks a developed ecosystem. Ah yes, the favorite criticism of bitter and cynical engineers, right up to the moment they switch to “it’s old and crufty and the industry has moved on”. Oddly, none of these critiques ever seem to apply to the languages of one’s own choosing… > As an ML person myself it's not even useful for me to learn Rust unless I want to roll alot of my own stuff. Nobody anywhere is arguing any language is the best choice for all use-cases. Nobody anywhere is arguing for ML people to rewrite-it-in-rust. These are straw men of your own making. > Also, fucking lmao, get over yourself, Rust isn't that hard to learn More straw men! I literally never said this. Only that the community has made few if any attempts to promote it to complete novices, thus skewing the experience level of those who you do see promoting it (compared to popular languages that do promote themselves to novices). I don’t think Rust is hard to learn, but I do think Rust’s ownership model is hard to truly appreciate if you haven’t spent at least some time in the trenches of languages with manually-managed memory.
- tene 4y ago
  How would you expect the response to something genuinely better to be different, in a non-culty way?
  - mxkopy 4y ago
    Well there you go, if it's genuinely better it will speak for itself. See when I'm being an apologist I say shit like "Python-like syntax but it compiles to assembly" "You can mess with the AST like in LISP, to make everything differentiable" "You can type the code for 10x speed, or leave it untyped for readability, multiple dispatch is basically magic" You don't see me going around saying "Julia is objectively better" And not only because I don't want to be a cultist but because it isn't and can't be true, something about no free lunch, something about Gödel incompleteness and expressivity, something something...
dureuill 4y ago
I mean, it's only natural. I have been using C++, Python and Rust professionally, the developer experience is simply one order of magnitude better with Rust. The tooling is excellent, a sane compilation model brings you a lot, the type system is very helpful. Compared with C++, I measured x3 productivity on writing initial code on a project (sometimes C++ was the rewrite, sometimes Rust was, so not this kind of bias). Compounding maintenance, I expect it to tend to 1 order of magnitude in time. Meanwhile, using Python can sometimes feel magical, but I have to maintain a library written in the language, and I can feel that it hasn't been optimized for this use case. It is terribly hard to keep backward compatibility, adding typing annotations is somewhat useful, but has terrible ergonomics, ensuring no regression is a pain that translates to endless suites of unit tests even for trivial matters ("be your own compiler" will never be a great idea IMO, although tooling like pylance does help a bit). Meanwhile the rearguard is defending for new projects some kind of "No true Scotsman"ish modern C++ delusion, that I am still looking for and that moves like goalposts in every discussion I have with its proponents. My only explanation for the phenomenon is that it is fueled by hubris and sunk cost biases, because my experience with the modern idioms is that while they bring significant improvements, they are still very subpar compared to the expectations brought forth by a modern language, and memory safety related CVEs are still being written everyday in C++. So, what should I do? It is true that, in more than 15 years of coding, Rust represents a revolution in programming in my eyes. Should I sit idly while others are missing on it and someone is wrong on the Internet?
mwcampbell 4y ago
I don't believe I've been an over-the-top Rust advocate so far. But I use Rust, I like it so far, and I want to use it more. For me to be able to use it more, it would help if it had the good attributes of a popular language, including a broad ecosystem of libraries and relative ease of hiring developers. So I want Rust to be a popular language. That means winning at the short game. Maybe other Rust advocates have a similar motivation to mine.
catach 4y ago
Sometimes an agenda is as simple as "I really like this thing, and I think you'd like it too". I believe this is off-putting primarily due to the mental antibodies people must develop in an advertising-saturated culture. The death of enthusiasm.