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I think that Mozilla's Rust is aiming squarely at C++ developers, whereas Go is more of a Java replacement. And it's interesting to see Python and Ruby being s

I think that Mozilla's Rust is aiming squarely at C++ developers, whereas Go is more of a Java replacement. And it's interesting to see Python and Ruby being squeezed lately, from various directions; Clojure, Go, other languages. Since Python went mainstream and started being picked up for serious projects, it naturally came under the spotlight a lot more than it had previously, and I think many people have started to see some of its warts. The transition from version 2 -> 3 wasn't exactly a smooth one, either. Furthermore, although Python is a pretty good all-round language, it doesn't really excel at anything in particular, unlike for example Perl which continues to maintain a strong niche in the areas of text processing and system administration, despite its popularity having fallen away in some of the other areas it was formerly strong in. In my case, although I have recently moved from Perl to Racket for larger and/or more complex work, I still use Perl a lot for small, simple scripts (which constitute most of my programming). A couple of the Java guys I know switched from Python to Clojure for scripting tasks (I could never convince them to like Perl..), and have started to take an interest in languages like Scala and now Go for more substantial projects. For many years now, Python has been the fresh, fun challenger going up against older (and perhaps clunkier) languages, whereas now things seem to be shifting and Python may soon find its role has reversed and it has become the old, crufty language.

pcwalton 14y ago
"I think that Mozilla's Rust is aiming squarely at C++ developers, whereas Go is more of a Java replacement." I basically agree with this as a Rust developer (although I'm not sure about Go being in Java's niche; I think of it more as in node.js's niche -- highly scalable web apps). Early on, I think both Rust and Go were thought to be targeting the same segment, but it turned out that we really weren't. Personally, I'm completely fine with that; different language designs are appropriate for different roles. The huge amount of work that we've done to make non-allocating and manually-memory-managed code easy, predictable, and type-safe is totally overkill for Go's niche, for example, while for games and web browsers this sort of thing is essential.
- heretohelp 14y ago
  As someone who's tried (and failed) to learn Rust in the past: I'm going to elide any commentary about the syntax for now, as I know why it is the way it is (the type system/annotations). I'm basically just going to expound on one thing for the sake of emphasis. For the love of god make Rust more accessible. I don't mean dumbing down the type system or abandoning regions (I really hope that works out). I mean the frickin' documentation. Digging through the core libs to figure out how to dp fairly common case stuff is obscene. Part of the reason I like to tinker with Go in my spare time is that it's extremely hygienic, clean, cheap, and cheerful. Look at the way the "go" binary works, it does everything. It does builds, automatic formatting of code, the works. And it just "works". On top of that, I'd consider getting somebody more knowledgeable about Rust and get them to team up / pair-document with somebody who is a goddamn dumbass like me and start building tutorials/documentation together. I can't imagine the language's syntax and features are so nascent that tutorials and docs for core functionality/libs would be out of the question, you're already prototyping that web browser engine. Documentation is a UX problem, like syntax. Syntax alone crippled Erlang, please don't let obscurity harm a language I am very excited about. If there's any way I can help (maybe a trail of bread crumbs/notes from me as I try to learn it?), let me know in this thread or via email.
  - zedzedzed 14y ago
    Rust is still a nebula.... I expect a beginner freindly tutorial after some more stability in syntax. Now, pc will have a better answer for the availabilty beginner's tutorial... Good Documentation and Tutorial is factually a must.... Having said that, I am enjoying Rust, and I will have it as my primary production language for real software in future.(By next year, as Greydon say, when it is a bit more stable. Till then its just acedemic coding) And Patrick(reminding), People are asking for a good beginer's tutorial...
  - dochtman 14y ago
    +1. I recently tried to get a little bit of file I/O going and it was a PITA.
  - kibwen 14y ago
batista 14y ago
>Furthermore, although Python is a pretty good all-round language, it doesn't really excel at anything in particular, unlike for example Perl which continues to maintain a strong niche in the areas of text processing and system administration, despite its popularity having fallen away in some of the other areas it was formerly strong in. Well, it does excel in scientific computing. Biologists, astronomers and such use it a lot, and it has lots of advanced math/stats/physics etc libs, with fast C implementations underneath.
- draegtun 14y ago
  Ditto for Perl because of BioPerl (used in the Human Genome Project) & PDL (which IIRC was being used somewhere at NASA). links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioPerl http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioPerl | http://pdl.perl.org/ http://pdl.perl.org/
  - dalke 14y ago
    I believe Perl in bioinformatics was a combination of three or four factors. At that time, sequence analysis was mostly equivalent to string processing and executing command-line programs. Perl was a natural fit. Bioinformatics work used Suns running Sybase, so the researchers knew the Unix way of doing things, which is what perl builds on. This was the early days of the web, and bioinformatics people were very much into data sharing. They used perl to write CGI programs (both cgi-lib.pl and CGI.pm were written by bioinformatics people), so they had one language which they could use for sequence research, for system administration, and for data sharing. Other languages evolved through a different path. Chemistry, for example, tends to be more Python related. (I develop software for that field.) I think it's because the chemical graph data structure is harder to write naturally in Perl. Gene expression analysis uses a lot of R.
- jff 14y ago
  Run Python under strace sometime. Laugh as it attempts to open thousands of non-existent files just to start up. Cry when you imagine that happening on a thousand-node scientific computing cluster with an NFS root. IIRC we saw something on the order of 10-20 minutes to get Python started on every node of a Blue Gene allocation.
raphinou 14y ago
I'm very interested to know more about your use of racket in production. Could you share your experience?
- jonathansizz 14y ago
  Well, 'production' may be too grand a term. My programs are usually on the order of a few hundred lines or less. I'm a geneticist whose (work) code is centered around data processing. I previously used Perl for just about everything (although I've used Python & Ruby also), but started to broaden my programming horizons recently, and after a grand tour of what was on offer I settled on Racket as my language of choice for the more complex end of the scripts I was writing. I'm finding it easier to maintain (and especially refactor) complex scripts in Racket than I did in Perl (or Python or Ruby), and the increase in performance is substantial when processing huge data-sets. One current weakness of Racket here is the relative lack of specific libraries for bioinformatics, but most of my code doesn't need any anyway and when it does I revert to Perl. I'm also excited about investigating other areas of the language, especially Typed Racket, as static typing is something I haven't really utilized so far. In general, the more I learn about Racket the more I admire the quality of design that has gone into it; everything seems to be extremely well thought out, not just from a theoretical perspective, but from a practical one too.

pcwalton 14y ago

"I think that Mozilla's Rust is aiming squarely at C++ developers, whereas Go is more of a Java replacement." I basically agree with this as a Rust developer (although I'm not sure about Go being in Java's niche; I think of it more as in node.js's niche -- highly scalable web apps). Early on, I think both Rust and Go were thought to be targeting the same segment, but it turned out that we really weren't. Personally, I'm completely fine with that; different language designs are appropriate for different roles. The huge amount of work that we've done to make non-allocating and manually-memory-managed code easy, predictable, and type-safe is totally overkill for Go's niche, for example, while for games and web browsers this sort of thing is essential.

heretohelp 14y ago
As someone who's tried (and failed) to learn Rust in the past: I'm going to elide any commentary about the syntax for now, as I know why it is the way it is (the type system/annotations). I'm basically just going to expound on one thing for the sake of emphasis. For the love of god make Rust more accessible. I don't mean dumbing down the type system or abandoning regions (I really hope that works out). I mean the frickin' documentation. Digging through the core libs to figure out how to dp fairly common case stuff is obscene. Part of the reason I like to tinker with Go in my spare time is that it's extremely hygienic, clean, cheap, and cheerful. Look at the way the "go" binary works, it does everything. It does builds, automatic formatting of code, the works. And it just "works". On top of that, I'd consider getting somebody more knowledgeable about Rust and get them to team up / pair-document with somebody who is a goddamn dumbass like me and start building tutorials/documentation together. I can't imagine the language's syntax and features are so nascent that tutorials and docs for core functionality/libs would be out of the question, you're already prototyping that web browser engine. Documentation is a UX problem, like syntax. Syntax alone crippled Erlang, please don't let obscurity harm a language I am very excited about. If there's any way I can help (maybe a trail of bread crumbs/notes from me as I try to learn it?), let me know in this thread or via email.
- zedzedzed 14y ago
  Rust is still a nebula.... I expect a beginner freindly tutorial after some more stability in syntax. Now, pc will have a better answer for the availabilty beginner's tutorial... Good Documentation and Tutorial is factually a must.... Having said that, I am enjoying Rust, and I will have it as my primary production language for real software in future.(By next year, as Greydon say, when it is a bit more stable. Till then its just acedemic coding) And Patrick(reminding), People are asking for a good beginer's tutorial...
- dochtman 14y ago
  +1. I recently tried to get a little bit of file I/O going and it was a PITA.
- kibwen 14y ago

batista 14y ago

>Furthermore, although Python is a pretty good all-round language, it doesn't really excel at anything in particular, unlike for example Perl which continues to maintain a strong niche in the areas of text processing and system administration, despite its popularity having fallen away in some of the other areas it was formerly strong in. Well, it does excel in scientific computing. Biologists, astronomers and such use it a lot, and it has lots of advanced math/stats/physics etc libs, with fast C implementations underneath.

draegtun 14y ago
Ditto for Perl because of BioPerl (used in the Human Genome Project) & PDL (which IIRC was being used somewhere at NASA). links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioPerl http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioPerl | http://pdl.perl.org/ http://pdl.perl.org/
- dalke 14y ago
  I believe Perl in bioinformatics was a combination of three or four factors. At that time, sequence analysis was mostly equivalent to string processing and executing command-line programs. Perl was a natural fit. Bioinformatics work used Suns running Sybase, so the researchers knew the Unix way of doing things, which is what perl builds on. This was the early days of the web, and bioinformatics people were very much into data sharing. They used perl to write CGI programs (both cgi-lib.pl and CGI.pm were written by bioinformatics people), so they had one language which they could use for sequence research, for system administration, and for data sharing. Other languages evolved through a different path. Chemistry, for example, tends to be more Python related. (I develop software for that field.) I think it's because the chemical graph data structure is harder to write naturally in Perl. Gene expression analysis uses a lot of R.
jff 14y ago
Run Python under strace sometime. Laugh as it attempts to open thousands of non-existent files just to start up. Cry when you imagine that happening on a thousand-node scientific computing cluster with an NFS root. IIRC we saw something on the order of 10-20 minutes to get Python started on every node of a Blue Gene allocation.

raphinou 14y ago

I'm very interested to know more about your use of racket in production. Could you share your experience?

jonathansizz 14y ago
Well, 'production' may be too grand a term. My programs are usually on the order of a few hundred lines or less. I'm a geneticist whose (work) code is centered around data processing. I previously used Perl for just about everything (although I've used Python & Ruby also), but started to broaden my programming horizons recently, and after a grand tour of what was on offer I settled on Racket as my language of choice for the more complex end of the scripts I was writing. I'm finding it easier to maintain (and especially refactor) complex scripts in Racket than I did in Perl (or Python or Ruby), and the increase in performance is substantial when processing huge data-sets. One current weakness of Racket here is the relative lack of specific libraries for bioinformatics, but most of my code doesn't need any anyway and when it does I revert to Perl. I'm also excited about investigating other areas of the language, especially Typed Racket, as static typing is something I haven't really utilized so far. In general, the more I learn about Racket the more I admire the quality of design that has gone into it; everything seems to be extremely well thought out, not just from a theoretical perspective, but from a practical one too.