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Are you writing this because it’s really interesting or because you’re a Rust promoter? Sneaking in comments about Rust in discussions about other languages is

by blub 4y ago

Are you writing this because it’s really interesting or because you’re a Rust promoter? Sneaking in comments about Rust in discussions about other languages is a classic guerrilla marketing move that the Rust community is known for. Assuming the best intentions, one should think how misguided it is to look up to amoral entities like corporations as role-models. At a macro level, Google does what brings them money. At a micro level what brings the engineers promotions and improves their reputation.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tialaramex 4y ago
Rather than about Google, which is just a corporation albeit a large one, this is about the direction of C++. I've written about this before, there's a tendency to insist that if you just asked surely future C++ can accommodate whatever it is that is needed. What a bunch of people (many but not all from Google) did was write a C++ Proposal which says "This is what C++ needs" and the committee said "No". P2137 "Goals and Priorities for C++" That finally means you can have the next conversation, instead of "Surely C++ can do that" we can get to "OK, C++ won't do that - what are we going to do instead ?" The answers include a lot more Rust, as you have seen from Google and other entities. I'm presumably part of the "guerilla marketing" you're talking about, although I don't think it's useful to imagine a community as engaging in "guerilla marketing" when they do what people naturally do, communicate. When people whose first language is Spanish speak Spanish to each other on the bus and you overhear them, that's not "guerilla marketing" for Spanish by any useful definition. Here's the thing: If you think of this point as "guerilla marketing" then C++ has been riddled with "guerilla marketing" for Rust for several years. Vittorio's (failed) Epochs proposal for C++ 20 more or less just says "Look, Rust has this cool feature [Editions], we should do that too".
- still_grokking 4y ago
  > I'm presumably part of the "guerilla marketing" you're talking about, although I don't think it's useful to imagine a community as engaging in "guerilla marketing" when they do what people naturally do, communicate. Even I agree with all the rest, it's known that grass roots marketing is very strong in Google. There are people who's job includes to write on high impact channels like HN to promote things. The Rust hype does not come from thin air. It gets generated in part with the help of a lot of money in the background. Of course this time the task isn't difficult as Rust sells itself in large parts just on the ground of it's features. But this process gets accelerated with money of course. There are not much languages that made it purely by (or despite ;-)) their virtues. One honorable exception is Scala. It made it into the Top20 even it does not have a marketing division, only a small team behind, and a community that seems to love to produce bad publicity consistently (even the language excels at quite some things!). And there are cases like PHP, C, Objective-C (and for some likely, JS)… But let's not talk about those, …, historical accidents…
  - tialaramex 4y ago
    I would consider whether people like writing it to be a virtue, so I would argue that the widespread love for Rust is, in fact, an example of a language thriving on virtue. I have learned a great many languages (and forgotten some of them, a while back I was prompted to re-discover that last century I wrote a bunch of Scheme, my name is on the work and the timeline checks out but I don't remember it) over my lifetime. Rust is the first language where I want to go back and rewrite stuff in Rust because of how nice it is.
    - still_grokking 4y ago
      I'm a Scala fan. (Maybe this shows :-)). But I'm also quite excited by Rust lately. But coming from Scala my feeling is constantly: Rust is missing so much still! I would really like a language more like Scala but with the performance of Rust. Of course other people get very excited when using Rust because for many this is the first proper language they've ever encountered. But I'm quite unimpressed in general regarding "hyped" Rust features. I had immutable values, HOFs, ADTs, type-classes, pattern matching with exhaustivity checks, macros, and all that "since forever". But I miss HKTs, implicits, proper macros, and some other things in Rust. It will take at least a decade for Rust to catch up. But than Scala will be even farther away… But OK, at least one can say that the ML family of languages is finally succeeding. (Scala and Rust are both descendants of ML).
      - tialaramex 4y ago
        Sure, lots of things would be nice to have in Rust that aren't done yet. Some of them you can see in nightly, because their rough shape exists but isn't stabilised. Rust is taking things rather steady because of a strong preference for soundness. In particular I want a stable niche (my nook crate uses the unstable niches because that's the only way to do it, the intent is to use a stabilised mechanism when one exists), I want a stable way to write const implementations of traits which aren't necessarily const (and thus const for loops) and on the same lines I want const panic. A strong macro system is very dangerous. I use and like Rust's declarative ("By example") macros, and I appreciate the need for proc macros or other technology but it's very dangerous. Are Scala's macros somehow less dangerous? Or you just prefer how they work? Rust has come a pretty long way since 1.0. Once upon a time u8::MAX couldn't exist. There was no way to express the idea that a type has an associated constant, so that's why std::u8::MAX is (deprecated but) there. It's probably never going to be as comfortable to write Rust as Scala, but on the other hand it's definitely never going to be possible to deliver the performance of Rust in Scala.
- blub 4y ago
  What is needed by whom? Google are essentially an ad-sales corporation . Microsoft are a former OS development corpo which wants to be Google. Amazon are an online store. It’s sad how all these corporations which have repeatedly shown they don’t respect privacy or local laws ended up influencing technical standards for the entire world. If they have one thing in common is that they don’t want to invest in creating reliable products. They re-invent the wheel all the time, invent products that nobody wants and cancel them after a few years, create their own tools and languages and then shove them down everyone’s throat. They continuously churn new software, new features and updates because they don’t know when to stop growing, like tumors. The software industry is a swindle. Rust is the band-aid solution to bad practices that companies don’t want to reform because it’s not profitable to do so. Perhaps saying guerrilla marketing is being too lenient when it’s more like hustling and insinuating themselves in nearly all language discussions and trying to sell Rust. I’ve seen this in threads about C++, but also Go, Nim, C or even Python. See the self-declared Rust programmer replying to the parent comment for a good example. It doesn’t even matter if Rust is good, these people are as likable as pushy bazaar salesmen. If every time you wrote a comment here in English someone asked if you considered writing it in Spanish because it sounds more exotic, you’d get tired of that pretty fast.
  - still_grokking 4y ago
    I for my part decided to "fight" the fanboyism by even more fanboyism—instead of hatred. So we can even the level a little bit. If someone tries to "sell" their language I will start to sell "my" language, which is btw. Scala. Have you actually seen the new major version of Scala? Scala 3 is once again way ahead of the pack when it comes to modern language features! Rust looks like a little stripped down (but fast!) toy in comparison. Now you may beat me. ;-)

by blub 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

tialaramex 4y ago

Rather than about Google, which is just a corporation albeit a large one, this is about the direction of C++. I've written about this before, there's a tendency to insist that if you just asked surely future C++ can accommodate whatever it is that is needed. What a bunch of people (many but not all from Google) did was write a C++ Proposal which says "This is what C++ needs" and the committee said "No". P2137 "Goals and Priorities for C++" That finally means you can have the next conversation, instead of "Surely C++ can do that" we can get to "OK, C++ won't do that - what are we going to do instead ?" The answers include a lot more Rust, as you have seen from Google and other entities. I'm presumably part of the "guerilla marketing" you're talking about, although I don't think it's useful to imagine a community as engaging in "guerilla marketing" when they do what people naturally do, communicate. When people whose first language is Spanish speak Spanish to each other on the bus and you overhear them, that's not "guerilla marketing" for Spanish by any useful definition. Here's the thing: If you think of this point as "guerilla marketing" then C++ has been riddled with "guerilla marketing" for Rust for several years. Vittorio's (failed) Epochs proposal for C++ 20 more or less just says "Look, Rust has this cool feature [Editions], we should do that too".

still_grokking 4y ago
> I'm presumably part of the "guerilla marketing" you're talking about, although I don't think it's useful to imagine a community as engaging in "guerilla marketing" when they do what people naturally do, communicate. Even I agree with all the rest, it's known that grass roots marketing is very strong in Google. There are people who's job includes to write on high impact channels like HN to promote things. The Rust hype does not come from thin air. It gets generated in part with the help of a lot of money in the background. Of course this time the task isn't difficult as Rust sells itself in large parts just on the ground of it's features. But this process gets accelerated with money of course. There are not much languages that made it purely by (or despite ;-)) their virtues. One honorable exception is Scala. It made it into the Top20 even it does not have a marketing division, only a small team behind, and a community that seems to love to produce bad publicity consistently (even the language excels at quite some things!). And there are cases like PHP, C, Objective-C (and for some likely, JS)… But let's not talk about those, …, historical accidents…
- tialaramex 4y ago
  I would consider whether people like writing it to be a virtue, so I would argue that the widespread love for Rust is, in fact, an example of a language thriving on virtue. I have learned a great many languages (and forgotten some of them, a while back I was prompted to re-discover that last century I wrote a bunch of Scheme, my name is on the work and the timeline checks out but I don't remember it) over my lifetime. Rust is the first language where I want to go back and rewrite stuff in Rust because of how nice it is.
  - still_grokking 4y ago
    I'm a Scala fan. (Maybe this shows :-)). But I'm also quite excited by Rust lately. But coming from Scala my feeling is constantly: Rust is missing so much still! I would really like a language more like Scala but with the performance of Rust. Of course other people get very excited when using Rust because for many this is the first proper language they've ever encountered. But I'm quite unimpressed in general regarding "hyped" Rust features. I had immutable values, HOFs, ADTs, type-classes, pattern matching with exhaustivity checks, macros, and all that "since forever". But I miss HKTs, implicits, proper macros, and some other things in Rust. It will take at least a decade for Rust to catch up. But than Scala will be even farther away… But OK, at least one can say that the ML family of languages is finally succeeding. (Scala and Rust are both descendants of ML).
    - tialaramex 4y ago
      Sure, lots of things would be nice to have in Rust that aren't done yet. Some of them you can see in nightly, because their rough shape exists but isn't stabilised. Rust is taking things rather steady because of a strong preference for soundness. In particular I want a stable niche (my nook crate uses the unstable niches because that's the only way to do it, the intent is to use a stabilised mechanism when one exists), I want a stable way to write const implementations of traits which aren't necessarily const (and thus const for loops) and on the same lines I want const panic. A strong macro system is very dangerous. I use and like Rust's declarative ("By example") macros, and I appreciate the need for proc macros or other technology but it's very dangerous. Are Scala's macros somehow less dangerous? Or you just prefer how they work? Rust has come a pretty long way since 1.0. Once upon a time u8::MAX couldn't exist. There was no way to express the idea that a type has an associated constant, so that's why std::u8::MAX is (deprecated but) there. It's probably never going to be as comfortable to write Rust as Scala, but on the other hand it's definitely never going to be possible to deliver the performance of Rust in Scala.
blub 4y ago
What is needed by whom? Google are essentially an ad-sales corporation . Microsoft are a former OS development corpo which wants to be Google. Amazon are an online store. It’s sad how all these corporations which have repeatedly shown they don’t respect privacy or local laws ended up influencing technical standards for the entire world. If they have one thing in common is that they don’t want to invest in creating reliable products. They re-invent the wheel all the time, invent products that nobody wants and cancel them after a few years, create their own tools and languages and then shove them down everyone’s throat. They continuously churn new software, new features and updates because they don’t know when to stop growing, like tumors. The software industry is a swindle. Rust is the band-aid solution to bad practices that companies don’t want to reform because it’s not profitable to do so. Perhaps saying guerrilla marketing is being too lenient when it’s more like hustling and insinuating themselves in nearly all language discussions and trying to sell Rust. I’ve seen this in threads about C++, but also Go, Nim, C or even Python. See the self-declared Rust programmer replying to the parent comment for a good example. It doesn’t even matter if Rust is good, these people are as likable as pushy bazaar salesmen. If every time you wrote a comment here in English someone asked if you considered writing it in Spanish because it sounds more exotic, you’d get tired of that pretty fast.
- still_grokking 4y ago
  I for my part decided to "fight" the fanboyism by even more fanboyism—instead of hatred. So we can even the level a little bit. If someone tries to "sell" their language I will start to sell "my" language, which is btw. Scala. Have you actually seen the new major version of Scala? Scala 3 is once again way ahead of the pack when it comes to modern language features! Rust looks like a little stripped down (but fast!) toy in comparison. Now you may beat me. ;-)