Re:Moving on from Rails and What’s Next
by ajmurmann on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @10:24AM
(#19563561)
I don't disagree that making the language small is a great goal and makes the language better. I just think that such a language will not appeal to everyone who enjoyed a large language full of syntactic sugar like Ruby. In fact I very much agree with Go's design goals and see lots of problems with Rust's design choices, at least when considering it for "mondain" work like web dev. However, I cannot get myself excited about Go at all, while I am very excited about Rust. I think it's that Rust, especially coming from Ruby, has interesting new concepts that lead to many rewarding learnings where you change how you reason about some things. When I read about Go, there are no surprises, everything immediately makes sense. All of this is good. It's also boring (in a good way). If I somehow got forced to use one of these languages for a new startup, I'd go with Go. If I had to pick one for playing around with on the weekend, I'd definitely go with Rust.
Re:Moving on from Rails and What’s Next
by spellingbee on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @09:23PM
(#19568595)
Mundane... Not mondain
> Orthogonality in a programming language means that a relatively small set of primitive constructs can be combined in a relatively small number of ways to build the control and data structures of the language[2]. It is associated with simplicity; the more orthogonal the design, the fewer exceptions. This makes it easier to learn, read and write programs in a programming language. The meaning of an orthogonal feature is independent of context; the key parameters are symmetry and consistency (for example, a pointer is an orthogonal concept).
Go modules are a fairly new feature which addresses past criticisms of Go dependency management so I don't think that's a valid criticism any more.