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If most people won't RTFM then most people won't get to become productive in Rust, so your pool of job applicants is diminished, the real-world use is lower, th

If most people won't RTFM then most people won't get to become productive in Rust, so your pool of job applicants is diminished, the real-world use is lower, the tooling and library support is reduced. Being a member of a super-elitist cabal that knows how to use Rust "properly" is not some point of pride, it's in fact a mortal danger for the language, just look at Haskell. And this is why the world has descended into Javascript hell, everybody and their mother are coding "apps" and "microservices" where each click is accompanied by a stack dump because the code is written by a student doing Elance in their spare time, but hey, it's good and fast enough to ship so you get to be first on the market and 3 years later your startup is bought by my bank and I can't login on my internet banking account without seeing that same revolting stack dump that couldn't be produced by a modern and flexible strong typed language. Real world doesn't care about abstract code purity metrics.

gary17the 4y ago
> Being a member of a super-elitist cabal that knows how to use Rust "properly" is not some point of pride I'm not sure I follow you, since I am saying something exactly opposite: anyone, even a mediocre, 1-year-of-experience programmer can successfully learn Rust, if only he or she tries to read a book on Rust, instead of just randomly hacking at Rust code. No "super-elitist" brain required, just a switch of learning methodology. > just look at Haskell The problem with Haskell is that it requires a monumental, conceptual switch from imperative programming to functional programming, which has not happened anywhere yet outside of academia (well, perhaps with the exception of functional reactive UI programming, e.g., React Native, Swift Combine, etc.), so Haskell is a tough sell in "real world", commercial organizations. Rust does not have this problem, since Rust does not rely on any "code [structure] metrics" (did I understand this right?), but instead moves as much bug detection as possible from runtime to compile-time (especially for multi-threaded applications).
alpaca128 4y ago
> Being a member of a super-elitist cabal that knows how to use Rust "properly" is not some point of pride Rust's ownership rules are simply an explicit form of what people already have to (and sometimes fail to) look out for in C/C++. If learning a language for a couple months makes one feel elitist that's not the language's fault. Though granted, some Rust people are...very eager at talking about its virtues.
hannofcart 4y ago
> Being a member of a super-elitist cabal that knows how to use Rust "properly" is not some point of pride, it's in fact a mortal danger for the language, just look at Haskell. Just a reminder of the Haskell motto: "Avoid success at all costs." So in their case, it's working as intended.
namaria 4y ago
I find it hard to accept that being first to market, capturing a lot of value and dumping it on a greater fool are things to aspire for. I see this argument in many forms all the time, in a nutshell: monetary gain should be the sole metric of success for engineering. Considering we are killing the planet and perma-exploiting entire classes of society following that logic, maybe we should change approach? But yeah ship it, pocket it. Why be idealistic if I just need to make enough money to retire and say "got mine, f you"?
- cornholio 4y ago
  If you won't ship it, then someone else with much worse ethics will, and they will also embed a secret GPS tracker that sells data to the worst abusers. Competing with unethical actors is already hard, playing the game on "super-hard" just to feel good about your ethics is actually setting yourself up for failure and betraying those ethics. Been there, done that for a decade or so, have nothing to point to as the net positive effect of my impeccable ethics, but I most certainly do lack the financial and political capital that would afford me any real impact. So by all means, ship it, make a trillion bucks, then educate and feed the poor and invest all your cash into eco technologies.
  - namaria 4y ago
    You are absolutely right. It is much, much easier to stoop to the average level of morality. And yes, attempting to have standards will certainly limit your earning potential. In the same way that preying on weaker communities around you via war, enslavement and pillaging has been a winning strategy for most of civilization. I truly think capitalism in its current form it immoral. And the fiction of effective altruism as a justification just makes it worse.
    - cornholio 4y ago
      Our current society, at least the western version of it, is by far the best human society that ever existed on this planet. Our levels of wealth were inconceivable even 300 years ago. Not even kings could have things we take for granted, like medical care, round the world air travel, indoor plumbing, lasting peace and physical security, access to information and learning. In a very extremist fashion, of course you can define a moral standard high enough that we will always fail. But the opportunity for you to think about such absolute moral issues - as opposed to literally slaving in a coalmine or birthing you 14th child and dying before the age of 45 - was created by moral pragmatists who were "effective altruists"[1] of their times , even if the only thing they did was to seek profits by inventing some type of better machine. We're at a cross road now where the existing mode of wealth production, focused on growth and individual material satisfaction, has reached the point of diminishing returns and even negative returns if we consider our fate as a species in the natural environment. But denying our ability for incremental improvement, forgoing our world building tools and returning to some elusive harmonious state of nature can't be the answer. [1] though I dislike that term due to its abuse by virtue signaling sociopaths

gary17the 4y ago

> Being a member of a super-elitist cabal that knows how to use Rust "properly" is not some point of pride I'm not sure I follow you, since I am saying something exactly opposite: anyone, even a mediocre, 1-year-of-experience programmer can successfully learn Rust, if only he or she tries to read a book on Rust, instead of just randomly hacking at Rust code. No "super-elitist" brain required, just a switch of learning methodology. > just look at Haskell The problem with Haskell is that it requires a monumental, conceptual switch from imperative programming to functional programming, which has not happened anywhere yet outside of academia (well, perhaps with the exception of functional reactive UI programming, e.g., React Native, Swift Combine, etc.), so Haskell is a tough sell in "real world", commercial organizations. Rust does not have this problem, since Rust does not rely on any "code [structure] metrics" (did I understand this right?), but instead moves as much bug detection as possible from runtime to compile-time (especially for multi-threaded applications).

alpaca128 4y ago

> Being a member of a super-elitist cabal that knows how to use Rust "properly" is not some point of pride Rust's ownership rules are simply an explicit form of what people already have to (and sometimes fail to) look out for in C/C++. If learning a language for a couple months makes one feel elitist that's not the language's fault. Though granted, some Rust people are...very eager at talking about its virtues.

hannofcart 4y ago

> Being a member of a super-elitist cabal that knows how to use Rust "properly" is not some point of pride, it's in fact a mortal danger for the language, just look at Haskell. Just a reminder of the Haskell motto: "Avoid success at all costs." So in their case, it's working as intended.

namaria 4y ago

I find it hard to accept that being first to market, capturing a lot of value and dumping it on a greater fool are things to aspire for. I see this argument in many forms all the time, in a nutshell: monetary gain should be the sole metric of success for engineering. Considering we are killing the planet and perma-exploiting entire classes of society following that logic, maybe we should change approach? But yeah ship it, pocket it. Why be idealistic if I just need to make enough money to retire and say "got mine, f you"?

cornholio 4y ago
If you won't ship it, then someone else with much worse ethics will, and they will also embed a secret GPS tracker that sells data to the worst abusers. Competing with unethical actors is already hard, playing the game on "super-hard" just to feel good about your ethics is actually setting yourself up for failure and betraying those ethics. Been there, done that for a decade or so, have nothing to point to as the net positive effect of my impeccable ethics, but I most certainly do lack the financial and political capital that would afford me any real impact. So by all means, ship it, make a trillion bucks, then educate and feed the poor and invest all your cash into eco technologies.
- namaria 4y ago
  You are absolutely right. It is much, much easier to stoop to the average level of morality. And yes, attempting to have standards will certainly limit your earning potential. In the same way that preying on weaker communities around you via war, enslavement and pillaging has been a winning strategy for most of civilization. I truly think capitalism in its current form it immoral. And the fiction of effective altruism as a justification just makes it worse.
  - cornholio 4y ago
    Our current society, at least the western version of it, is by far the best human society that ever existed on this planet. Our levels of wealth were inconceivable even 300 years ago. Not even kings could have things we take for granted, like medical care, round the world air travel, indoor plumbing, lasting peace and physical security, access to information and learning. In a very extremist fashion, of course you can define a moral standard high enough that we will always fail. But the opportunity for you to think about such absolute moral issues - as opposed to literally slaving in a coalmine or birthing you 14th child and dying before the age of 45 - was created by moral pragmatists who were "effective altruists"[1] of their times , even if the only thing they did was to seek profits by inventing some type of better machine. We're at a cross road now where the existing mode of wealth production, focused on growth and individual material satisfaction, has reached the point of diminishing returns and even negative returns if we consider our fate as a species in the natural environment. But denying our ability for incremental improvement, forgoing our world building tools and returning to some elusive harmonious state of nature can't be the answer. [1] though I dislike that term due to its abuse by virtue signaling sociopaths