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> Well there's your problem. Rust does look like a semi-colon language, that's intentional, but if that's all you understand you're probably going to struggle.

> Well there's your problem. Rust does look like a semi-colon language, that's intentional, but if that's all you understand you're probably going to struggle. This is a silly point to make. What makes a C++ programmer a C++ programmer is not an uncanny ability to find a semicolon on the keyboard. It's stuff like using low-level constructs, having a working mental model of how to manage resources at a low level down and how to pass and track ownership of resources across boundaries. This is not a syntax issue. It's absurd. You have people claiming that Rust is the natural progression for C++ programmers because their skillsets, mental models, and application domain overlap, but here are you negating all that and try to portray it as a semicolon issue?

tialaramex 2y ago
Oh! Alas the apparent syntax similarity is misleading. If you prefer imagine I wrote "C-like language" anywhere that I wrote "semi-colon language". It's not really about the semi-colon, indeed the semi-colon isn't even doing the same thing and that's a clue†. You see, the typical semi-colon languages you'll have used such as C++ or Java have these "everything is a machine integer" type systems which were a small step up from the "Who needs a type system" of their predecessors but aren't anywhere close to what you'd expect in an ML or a functional language. So this means there's a substantial learning curve, or, if you try to just keep writing C++ even though you're in Rust, an impedance mismatch. It looks superficially like the thing you're used to, but that's not what it is. † In Rust the semi-colon is turning your expression into a statement, but in the semi-colon languages it's a separator, everything is a statement anyway. So while a rust program might say let x = if k > 3 { plenty(k) } else { too_few() }; in the semi-colon languages there's a whole separate ternary operator provided to do this trick - in fact they don't have any other ternary operators and so they often call this "the" ternary operator which is very funny if you come from a language which has the multiply-accumulate operator...
sfink 2y ago
That's an... uncharitable interpretation of the phrase "semi-colon language". The comment made sense to me: it's not at all about semicolons, but the semicolon isn't a bad marker to distinguish between language families. It's closely related to expression- vs statement-focused languages, which if you squint is similar to the distinction between imperative and functional languages. Though the latter distinction is less relevant here, I'm just using it to point out that semicolon syntax is suggestive of semantics, even if it is itself just a superficial bit of syntax. You are correctly describing the awareness of resource management as an important characteristic, but that resource management is heavily intertwined with how values flow through the language syntax, which brings us back to expressions vs statements.

tialaramex 2y ago

Oh! Alas the apparent syntax similarity is misleading. If you prefer imagine I wrote "C-like language" anywhere that I wrote "semi-colon language". It's not really about the semi-colon, indeed the semi-colon isn't even doing the same thing and that's a clue†. You see, the typical semi-colon languages you'll have used such as C++ or Java have these "everything is a machine integer" type systems which were a small step up from the "Who needs a type system" of their predecessors but aren't anywhere close to what you'd expect in an ML or a functional language. So this means there's a substantial learning curve, or, if you try to just keep writing C++ even though you're in Rust, an impedance mismatch. It looks superficially like the thing you're used to, but that's not what it is. † In Rust the semi-colon is turning your expression into a statement, but in the semi-colon languages it's a separator, everything is a statement anyway. So while a rust program might say let x = if k > 3 { plenty(k) } else { too_few() }; in the semi-colon languages there's a whole separate ternary operator provided to do this trick - in fact they don't have any other ternary operators and so they often call this "the" ternary operator which is very funny if you come from a language which has the multiply-accumulate operator...

sfink 2y ago

That's an... uncharitable interpretation of the phrase "semi-colon language". The comment made sense to me: it's not at all about semicolons, but the semicolon isn't a bad marker to distinguish between language families. It's closely related to expression- vs statement-focused languages, which if you squint is similar to the distinction between imperative and functional languages. Though the latter distinction is less relevant here, I'm just using it to point out that semicolon syntax is suggestive of semantics, even if it is itself just a superficial bit of syntax. You are correctly describing the awareness of resource management as an important characteristic, but that resource management is heavily intertwined with how values flow through the language syntax, which brings us back to expressions vs statements.