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I think Rust deserves a lot of credit for popularizing the notion of “constraints as power”, but excessive enthusiasm around it does seem to obscure the rich tr

I think Rust deserves a lot of credit for popularizing the notion of “constraints as power”, but excessive enthusiasm around it does seem to obscure the rich traditions of PLT that it has more than liberally borrowed from. There are more rungs on the ladder.

Kinrany 4y ago
"Constraints as power" describes the proposition of all statically typed languages. But the compilers of popular languages weren't smart enough to cover many common scenarios, forcing language designers to offer many unsafe escape hatches.
- benreesman 4y ago
  It’s a very valuable thing to be able to separate the mental model one uses from the target machine language. I worry about the more ardent Rust enthusiasts because it seems popular in those circles to embrace an attitude that we’ve somehow arrived at the right conceptual framework. Rust is a competent, pragmatic embedding of a few of the big ideas from serious PLT into a well-optimized C++ compiler toolchain, and it’s cool and useful as a result. But I hope to God it’s not the endgame on fast ML/Haskell/Lisp.
  - tialaramex 4y ago
    I'd be disappointed if the best language people are writing software in when I retire (perhaps a decade or at most two in the future) is Rust. We can surely do better. But I'd be even more disappointed if the best language people are writing software in when I retire isn't even Rust.
  - ldng 4y ago
    To be successful a language still has to be approachable to most dev. I just hope you are not conflating PLT with Functional. Look what functionalist did to Scala... It had an interesting balance and they destroyed it.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Interestingly Object Pascal was my introduction to data type modelling for constraints, followed by Caml Light, Modula-3 and Ada. Naturally one can argue they weren't popular, with exception of Object Pascal.
throwaway894345 4y ago
I say this as someone who has had a lot of criticism for Rust: Rust definitely borrows a lot from other languages, but Rust deserves praise precisely because it curates the right features and composes them in the right way. There are way too many languages from the PLT space that add some neat type system innovation, but they fail on syntax or performance or tooling or etc. That's not particularly laudable IMO, but Rust has great tooling (cargo, rust-analyzer, rustfmt, rustup, etc), great performance, great safety, and a bunch of type system innovations (including its approach to memory management) which were probably picked from the PLT world. The individual features are neat, but Rust is much greater than the sum of those borrowed innovations. Choosing what features to use and which to omit is a much more valuable task than any individual innovation.
- benreesman 4y ago
  Credit where credit is due: Rust has done a far better job than most of free-riding on Haskell’s type class system and clang’s optimizer, but rust-analyzer is a dumpster fire next to clangd, that’s not an example I’d use.
  - mustache_kimono 4y ago
    Um what? Maybe it's just that I don't understand what clangd provides that's so great, but rust-analyzer, despite a few hiccups I've had with it, seems completely amazing at what it does.
    - benreesman 4y ago
      Well we could start with the fact that it crashes process IDs more often than Justin Bieber crashes Maseratis: https://github.com/rust-lang/vscode-rust/issues/890 https://github.com/rust-lang/vscode-rust/issues/890 (it’s always LLVM’s fault, I know). Or move right along to the insane configuration hacks that are mandatory if you want anything upmarket of VSCode (who doesn’t need a little practice with their Emacs Lisp), or the N^2 whatever that happens when you point it at bindgen output. What clangd does is work.
pjmlp 4y ago
Yeah, specially when people refer to stuff taken from ML as Rust "features".

Kinrany 4y ago

"Constraints as power" describes the proposition of all statically typed languages. But the compilers of popular languages weren't smart enough to cover many common scenarios, forcing language designers to offer many unsafe escape hatches.

benreesman 4y ago
It’s a very valuable thing to be able to separate the mental model one uses from the target machine language. I worry about the more ardent Rust enthusiasts because it seems popular in those circles to embrace an attitude that we’ve somehow arrived at the right conceptual framework. Rust is a competent, pragmatic embedding of a few of the big ideas from serious PLT into a well-optimized C++ compiler toolchain, and it’s cool and useful as a result. But I hope to God it’s not the endgame on fast ML/Haskell/Lisp.
- tialaramex 4y ago
  I'd be disappointed if the best language people are writing software in when I retire (perhaps a decade or at most two in the future) is Rust. We can surely do better. But I'd be even more disappointed if the best language people are writing software in when I retire isn't even Rust.
- ldng 4y ago
  To be successful a language still has to be approachable to most dev. I just hope you are not conflating PLT with Functional. Look what functionalist did to Scala... It had an interesting balance and they destroyed it.
pjmlp 4y ago
Interestingly Object Pascal was my introduction to data type modelling for constraints, followed by Caml Light, Modula-3 and Ada. Naturally one can argue they weren't popular, with exception of Object Pascal.

throwaway894345 4y ago

I say this as someone who has had a lot of criticism for Rust: Rust definitely borrows a lot from other languages, but Rust deserves praise precisely because it curates the right features and composes them in the right way. There are way too many languages from the PLT space that add some neat type system innovation, but they fail on syntax or performance or tooling or etc. That's not particularly laudable IMO, but Rust has great tooling (cargo, rust-analyzer, rustfmt, rustup, etc), great performance, great safety, and a bunch of type system innovations (including its approach to memory management) which were probably picked from the PLT world. The individual features are neat, but Rust is much greater than the sum of those borrowed innovations. Choosing what features to use and which to omit is a much more valuable task than any individual innovation.

benreesman 4y ago
Credit where credit is due: Rust has done a far better job than most of free-riding on Haskell’s type class system and clang’s optimizer, but rust-analyzer is a dumpster fire next to clangd, that’s not an example I’d use.
- mustache_kimono 4y ago
  Um what? Maybe it's just that I don't understand what clangd provides that's so great, but rust-analyzer, despite a few hiccups I've had with it, seems completely amazing at what it does.
  - benreesman 4y ago
    Well we could start with the fact that it crashes process IDs more often than Justin Bieber crashes Maseratis: https://github.com/rust-lang/vscode-rust/issues/890 https://github.com/rust-lang/vscode-rust/issues/890 (it’s always LLVM’s fault, I know). Or move right along to the insane configuration hacks that are mandatory if you want anything upmarket of VSCode (who doesn’t need a little practice with their Emacs Lisp), or the N^2 whatever that happens when you point it at bindgen output. What clangd does is work.

pjmlp 4y ago

Yeah, specially when people refer to stuff taken from ML as Rust "features".