3 ms·

I loathe to say you must be doing something wrong. I mean objectively it really should not be the case! There is literally a ton more you have to write and do f

by jasmer 4y ago

I loathe to say you must be doing something wrong. I mean objectively it really should not be the case! There is literally a ton more you have to write and do for the same thing in Rust. You get runtime safety and performance as a benefit, but those are not benefits in rapid prototyping.

foota 4y ago
Sometimes, not making mistakes can help your velocity more than it being quick to type out. It depends I think on what you're doing.
- jasmer 4y ago
  I'll give you that. And if someone is really in the 'zen' with a language, I can see them being quick on the draw. And it depends a lot on the project and deps. as well.
Jtsummers 4y ago
When I've prototyped in Python I mostly find myself using tuples, dictionaries, and lists. Generally the dicts and lists contain homogenous types but occasionally heterogenous types but they're really "variants" (variations on a theme). Writing the same types of programs in Rust usually proved straightforward by (ab)using the same basic types and operations on them. For handling the occasional heterogenous collection case, an enum of related variants sufficed and it wasn't a much slower effort than prototyping in Python would have been. I would expect someone with more Rust experience than me (which is not much) to be at least as fast as I am with Python in Rust, especially if they know the tooling better. At least for these kinds of tasks.
- anon291 4y ago
  Python is much easier to follow in 2023 with its optional typing support and fantastic libraries like Pydantic that make it easy to use. We are deeply missing a statically typed scripting language.
  - MrJohz 4y ago
    The optional typing in Python is pretty mediocre, especially in comparison to something like Typescript that just does everything so much better. The types are pretty limited and not very ergonomic (especially when using generics or functions), and third party support is hit-and-miss. The worst thing, I think, is that the Python typing community are trying to solve lots of the problems with plugins rather than by improving the capabilities of the type system. This might produce better results in the short run, but in the long run it makes things more complicated, as for a given project I need to understand (a) how Python works, (b) how Python types work, and now (c) how each of the plugins installed in this project work and how they interact. I really want to like typed Python, but it's a pale shadow of what it could be, and what it really needs to be if people want to use it to describe very dynamic Python programs.
anon291 4y ago
> There is literally a ton more you have to write and do for the same thing in Rust. This is not true. Rust and python are about equivalent. Python is difficult to understand because the vast majority of library documentation is simply lists of examples, without any unifying theory. Languages like Rust and Haskell offer much more comprehensive documentation with obvious ways to fit things together based on a well-understood and rigidly specified compositional specification (types).
- jasmer 4y ago
  With rust you have to specify type, usually a container/reference type, and annotate lifetimes of everything you pass around. You literally do none of that in Python. You don't even declare variables. They are totally on the opposite ends of 'strictness'.
  - shpongled 4y ago
    For rapid prototyping I (who you originally replied to) completely avoid lifetimes. If you think you have to "annotate lifetimes of everything you pass around", you should probably revisit Rust. This is simply not true. I find type annotations to be a major benefit while prototyping - I know exactly what everything is, and can quickly refactor anything. The ability to use serde to deserialize/serialize into Rust structs is another huge benefit. Chaining iterators, collections, etc removes a lot of the boilerplate that I find myself doing in python. I've also been using Rust as my primary programming language for 5+ years now, so I am definitely "in the zone"

by jasmer 4y ago

foota 4y ago

Sometimes, not making mistakes can help your velocity more than it being quick to type out. It depends I think on what you're doing.

jasmer 4y ago
I'll give you that. And if someone is really in the 'zen' with a language, I can see them being quick on the draw. And it depends a lot on the project and deps. as well.

Jtsummers 4y ago

When I've prototyped in Python I mostly find myself using tuples, dictionaries, and lists. Generally the dicts and lists contain homogenous types but occasionally heterogenous types but they're really "variants" (variations on a theme). Writing the same types of programs in Rust usually proved straightforward by (ab)using the same basic types and operations on them. For handling the occasional heterogenous collection case, an enum of related variants sufficed and it wasn't a much slower effort than prototyping in Python would have been. I would expect someone with more Rust experience than me (which is not much) to be at least as fast as I am with Python in Rust, especially if they know the tooling better. At least for these kinds of tasks.

anon291 4y ago
Python is much easier to follow in 2023 with its optional typing support and fantastic libraries like Pydantic that make it easy to use. We are deeply missing a statically typed scripting language.
- MrJohz 4y ago
  The optional typing in Python is pretty mediocre, especially in comparison to something like Typescript that just does everything so much better. The types are pretty limited and not very ergonomic (especially when using generics or functions), and third party support is hit-and-miss. The worst thing, I think, is that the Python typing community are trying to solve lots of the problems with plugins rather than by improving the capabilities of the type system. This might produce better results in the short run, but in the long run it makes things more complicated, as for a given project I need to understand (a) how Python works, (b) how Python types work, and now (c) how each of the plugins installed in this project work and how they interact. I really want to like typed Python, but it's a pale shadow of what it could be, and what it really needs to be if people want to use it to describe very dynamic Python programs.

anon291 4y ago

> There is literally a ton more you have to write and do for the same thing in Rust. This is not true. Rust and python are about equivalent. Python is difficult to understand because the vast majority of library documentation is simply lists of examples, without any unifying theory. Languages like Rust and Haskell offer much more comprehensive documentation with obvious ways to fit things together based on a well-understood and rigidly specified compositional specification (types).

jasmer 4y ago
With rust you have to specify type, usually a container/reference type, and annotate lifetimes of everything you pass around. You literally do none of that in Python. You don't even declare variables. They are totally on the opposite ends of 'strictness'.
- shpongled 4y ago
  For rapid prototyping I (who you originally replied to) completely avoid lifetimes. If you think you have to "annotate lifetimes of everything you pass around", you should probably revisit Rust. This is simply not true. I find type annotations to be a major benefit while prototyping - I know exactly what everything is, and can quickly refactor anything. The ability to use serde to deserialize/serialize into Rust structs is another huge benefit. Chaining iterators, collections, etc removes a lot of the boilerplate that I find myself doing in python. I've also been using Rust as my primary programming language for 5+ years now, so I am definitely "in the zone"