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I think to some extent Rust is a victim of its own unreasonable effectiveness. It is great at its narrow niche of memory safe low level programming, but frankly

I think to some extent Rust is a victim of its own unreasonable effectiveness. It is great at its narrow niche of memory safe low level programming, but frankly pretty good at lots of other things. But at these other applications some of its design principles get in the way - like the pedantic borrow checker. Languages not used outside their niches don't tend to collect such criticism. Python is a bit like that. It is a top choice for a few things, and ends up used effectively for other things, simply because it is versatile. But then people run into issues with dynamic typing, zero static safety, start slapping type annotations everywhere... and bemoan Python as a bit of a horror show. My use case for Rust is complementing Python, where frankly I don't care about half the complex features, still it's nicer than C or C++ to code in. The complexities of the borrow checker are more like a tax to me. I understand people who are frustrated with it thought, as otherwise they see it as a bit of a perfect language.

throwawaymaths 2y ago
I think in general python gets used because of laziness and vitality. It's just the dumb shit that X person learned first because Y person before then was taught it because it was easy even though it's maybe not even the right choice for example, you can't properly write a working webserver in python without {venv, uvicorn, celery etc.} and if youve ever worked in another language its like why the hell is this shit here? Because it's viral, someone didn't know better, and it stuck. Same goes for machine learning. The ML folks at the start couldn't be bothered to learn something the least bit sophisticated. Some things are getting better. You don't need conda anymore, tensorflow wheels are out, and at least instead of shippong around .pt, checkpoint, or pickle files at least we use safetensors, but there's still python shit around, like jinja2 templates for conversations, etc. Anyways if we want good things we need to get better about getting unstuck from these local minima.
- rich_sasha 2y ago
  I disagree re Python. It is a brilliant, flexible scripting language. It is easy to build expressive libraries such as pytest or argparse, with deep introspection. It is easy to prototype by subtly changing return types, or even keeping them flexible. It is really easy to eg build a custom data type and build custom expression trees, such as what ML often needs. It has a number of features (often stemming from the above) that make it a PITA for other applications, even when it would be fairly well suited to them otherwise. What I would give for proper static typing for production Python! Alas, that's not coming, and Rust's occasionally mind boggling borrow checker is there to stay.
  - throwawaymaths 2y ago
    If you feel that way about python, it's really just likely you haven't tried anything else better. And anyways you probably shouldn't be serving a website with a scripting language (php and perl are great examples of why not). You probably shouldn't be deploying ml with a scripting language (maybe training is fine, if you're not doing distributed training). You probably shouldn't have too many core os components in a scripting language lookin at you Ubuntu, you probably shouldn't write a cloud (openstack) using a scripting language. What happened to "right tool for the right job".
    - rich_sasha 2y ago
      I don't think you're getting my point. It's a good scripting language - there may better ones, that's besides my point. And your heuristic is terribly wrong, I have used many languages, scripting and otherwise. My point is, it's great at its niche and good but kind of clunky at other things it ends up used for. At its off-niche applications, it attracts a lot of criticism - like you talking about how it's a bad idea to serve a webpage from a scripting language or productionise ML models. No one complains that C++ is clunky at, dunno, serving websites, simply because it is so ill suited for it that no one ever tries. But Rust is less obviously a bad choice. Still that attracts people who find it clunky when they "just" want to serve a webpage and don't want to deal with the vagaries of borrow checker.
ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
People keep talking about the borrow checker. I have written over 70k lines in Rust so far and it hasn't really been that big of an issue. There are large-ish projects like Zed and Zellij in Rust which seem to be pretty straightforward code as well. I feel it's a bit overblown the whole borrow checker issue.
RandomThoughts3 2y ago
I think Python is entirely different and a perfect exemple of why popularity trumps quality. I can’t think of any domains where Python would be the better choice. It’s actually pretty bad all things being considered but well the ecosystem is okay and plenty of people know it so why not. JS is another great exemple of that.

throwawaymaths 2y ago

I think in general python gets used because of laziness and vitality. It's just the dumb shit that X person learned first because Y person before then was taught it because it was easy even though it's maybe not even the right choice for example, you can't properly write a working webserver in python without {venv, uvicorn, celery etc.} and if youve ever worked in another language its like why the hell is this shit here? Because it's viral, someone didn't know better, and it stuck. Same goes for machine learning. The ML folks at the start couldn't be bothered to learn something the least bit sophisticated. Some things are getting better. You don't need conda anymore, tensorflow wheels are out, and at least instead of shippong around .pt, checkpoint, or pickle files at least we use safetensors, but there's still python shit around, like jinja2 templates for conversations, etc. Anyways if we want good things we need to get better about getting unstuck from these local minima.

rich_sasha 2y ago
I disagree re Python. It is a brilliant, flexible scripting language. It is easy to build expressive libraries such as pytest or argparse, with deep introspection. It is easy to prototype by subtly changing return types, or even keeping them flexible. It is really easy to eg build a custom data type and build custom expression trees, such as what ML often needs. It has a number of features (often stemming from the above) that make it a PITA for other applications, even when it would be fairly well suited to them otherwise. What I would give for proper static typing for production Python! Alas, that's not coming, and Rust's occasionally mind boggling borrow checker is there to stay.
- throwawaymaths 2y ago
  If you feel that way about python, it's really just likely you haven't tried anything else better. And anyways you probably shouldn't be serving a website with a scripting language (php and perl are great examples of why not). You probably shouldn't be deploying ml with a scripting language (maybe training is fine, if you're not doing distributed training). You probably shouldn't have too many core os components in a scripting language lookin at you Ubuntu, you probably shouldn't write a cloud (openstack) using a scripting language. What happened to "right tool for the right job".
  - rich_sasha 2y ago
    I don't think you're getting my point. It's a good scripting language - there may better ones, that's besides my point. And your heuristic is terribly wrong, I have used many languages, scripting and otherwise. My point is, it's great at its niche and good but kind of clunky at other things it ends up used for. At its off-niche applications, it attracts a lot of criticism - like you talking about how it's a bad idea to serve a webpage from a scripting language or productionise ML models. No one complains that C++ is clunky at, dunno, serving websites, simply because it is so ill suited for it that no one ever tries. But Rust is less obviously a bad choice. Still that attracts people who find it clunky when they "just" want to serve a webpage and don't want to deal with the vagaries of borrow checker.

ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago

People keep talking about the borrow checker. I have written over 70k lines in Rust so far and it hasn't really been that big of an issue. There are large-ish projects like Zed and Zellij in Rust which seem to be pretty straightforward code as well. I feel it's a bit overblown the whole borrow checker issue.

RandomThoughts3 2y ago

I think Python is entirely different and a perfect exemple of why popularity trumps quality. I can’t think of any domains where Python would be the better choice. It’s actually pretty bad all things being considered but well the ecosystem is okay and plenty of people know it so why not. JS is another great exemple of that.