Re:Things I hate about Rust
by steveklabnik on Wednesday May 20, 2020 @12:17PM
(#23248650)
> My very strong opinion is that the language should impose as little cognitive load as possible.
The key there is "as possible." What is possible depends on the constraints and the goals. Rust does "impose as little cognitive load as possible" generally, given its goals as a language. You can nitpick about some parts of this, but at least all of the examples in the post have good reasons why they need to be this way, thanks to the goals for the language.
Rust and Go have different goals, and so "as possible" is something that means different things for each language.
On the subjective side:
> Rust seems like it makes you think a lot about Rust, which means you are not thinking about the problem you are trying to solve. Brain cycles are a finite resource.
This is true at the start, but once you get over the hump, you don't really spend any time thinking about this. The strictness is what lets you not need to care as much: the compiler will check your work, so you don't have to think about things very hard. It takes a while to get there though.
The key there is "as possible." What is possible depends on the constraints and the goals. Rust does "impose as little cognitive load as possible" generally, given its goals as a language. You can nitpick about some parts of this, but at least all of the examples in the post have good reasons why they need to be this way, thanks to the goals for the language.
Rust and Go have different goals, and so "as possible" is something that means different things for each language.
On the subjective side:
> Rust seems like it makes you think a lot about Rust, which means you are not thinking about the problem you are trying to solve. Brain cycles are a finite resource.
This is true at the start, but once you get over the hump, you don't really spend any time thinking about this. The strictness is what lets you not need to care as much: the compiler will check your work, so you don't have to think about things very hard. It takes a while to get there though.