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“Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good” - how much of Rust’s success comes from the fact that it started from a C-like base? Doing it differently might end up
by orf 2y ago
“Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good” - how much of Rust’s success comes from the fact that it started from a C-like base?
Doing it differently might end up with a better result from a purist viewpoint, but I’d wager that adoption would have been far worse.
- LiamPowell 2y agoProbably true, although I wonder how much comes from acting like C semantically and how much comes from looking like C. If Rust had taken Ada and made it look like C then would it still be so popular? My guess is that it would be since there's already a steep learning curve for a C developer to pick up Rust. For a developer who's willing to go through all that I don't think a few more new concepts would be a major issue.
- estebank 2y agoOr it could have killed it on the vine because the syntax was too esoteric and would have pushed the target demographic away before they even tried it. It's hard to test the counter factual in this case. A common topic of conversation in the rust project is the concept of "weirdness budget": the idea that you can only be so different from what your expected userbase already knows before you become too hard to learn. I don't think you could introduce the borrow checker on a language like Erlang if you're aiming at systems programming. But now you could make a language that is slightly more weird (introducing other features) than Rust when targeting existing Rust programmers.