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Twenty-four years ago, Python already looked better to me. I maintained a big Perl 5 app. Yuck. The problem wasn't that you couldn't write it, the problem was t

by adamc 2y ago

Twenty-four years ago, Python already looked better to me. I maintained a big Perl 5 app. Yuck. The problem wasn't that you couldn't write it, the problem was that you had to be able to read widely differing styles of Perl... and if you wanted to read library code, it was a huge pain. I quit maintaining that system in 2005, and it has barely changed since, from what I'm told. Viability of a language is certainly a consideration, but the characteristics of the language also matter. What you couldn't really predict about Java in, say, 2000, was how much the complexity of its ecosystem would grow. In 2000 (or 2005) it was fairly easy to move in and out of Java from project to project. That is not true today. My fear on the Rust front is that it's going to be another C++, where the complexity is considerable and requires more or less full-time expertise.

sshine 2y ago
> My fear on the Rust front is that it's going to be another C++, where the complexity is considerable and requires more or less full-time expertise. You can certainly make a case for that being inevitable in some ways: Rust can be written in many ways to address different levels of abstraction, and when you stack those, you can require the reader to know about all of them. If someone gives me a piece of Python code, it can only be hard to understand if the domain is hard (e.g physics) or it is poorly written. In that way, Rust belongs with C++ and Haskell. The abstractions that Rust will introduce over time won’t grow in all directions like with C++ and Haskell (e.g. you won’t get higher-kinded types or GADTs in the next ten years).
pjmlp 2y ago
In 2000, Java was still about doing dancing applets, businesses only started taking Java marketing seriously after two things happened, Hotspot became a thing, making it more appealing than C++ for cross-platform server code, versus dealing with the mess of writing portable C++ code when most compilers were a mix of C++ARM and catching up to C++98, with C++ compiler specific frameworks being heavily used. The second one was Sun's Distributed Objects Everywhere project being canceled, and the Objective-C code being reborn into the first J2EE proposal. There was nothing else like that for business software other than Smalltalk and later .NET, however most Java vendors were ex-Smalltalkers, and in 2001 .NET was a no-go for anyone that would care about supporting UNIX deployments as well. In 2001, we were moving away from scripting + write extensions into C, into Java, and only pivoted into .NET because being a MSFT partner with access to the "partner eyes only" betas from Microsft before .NET was announced, additionally there was some ideas to move away from UNIX customers. However by 2006, while at Nokia Networks, a strong UNIX shop back then, the large majority of their applications were going into the Rewrite into Java phase.

by adamc 2y ago

sshine 2y ago

> My fear on the Rust front is that it's going to be another C++, where the complexity is considerable and requires more or less full-time expertise. You can certainly make a case for that being inevitable in some ways: Rust can be written in many ways to address different levels of abstraction, and when you stack those, you can require the reader to know about all of them. If someone gives me a piece of Python code, it can only be hard to understand if the domain is hard (e.g physics) or it is poorly written. In that way, Rust belongs with C++ and Haskell. The abstractions that Rust will introduce over time won’t grow in all directions like with C++ and Haskell (e.g. you won’t get higher-kinded types or GADTs in the next ten years).

pjmlp 2y ago

In 2000, Java was still about doing dancing applets, businesses only started taking Java marketing seriously after two things happened, Hotspot became a thing, making it more appealing than C++ for cross-platform server code, versus dealing with the mess of writing portable C++ code when most compilers were a mix of C++ARM and catching up to C++98, with C++ compiler specific frameworks being heavily used. The second one was Sun's Distributed Objects Everywhere project being canceled, and the Objective-C code being reborn into the first J2EE proposal. There was nothing else like that for business software other than Smalltalk and later .NET, however most Java vendors were ex-Smalltalkers, and in 2001 .NET was a no-go for anyone that would care about supporting UNIX deployments as well. In 2001, we were moving away from scripting + write extensions into C, into Java, and only pivoted into .NET because being a MSFT partner with access to the "partner eyes only" betas from Microsft before .NET was announced, additionally there was some ideas to move away from UNIX customers. However by 2006, while at Nokia Networks, a strong UNIX shop back then, the large majority of their applications were going into the Rewrite into Java phase.