I would call C a serious language. Its running your laptop, your phone, your car, the airplane you took on holiday, the fighter planes that protect your airspace, your washing machine, and if you are unfortunate enough to get seriously ill it will probably be running on the medical equipment that keeps you alive.

One of the reasons it is serious is because it is standardized and multiple implementations exist.

So if that's the criteria, then brainfuck is a serious language.

If one wants to use a tool in a life-critical system, a system that might be in use for decades they're going to reach for one of the said "serious languages": C, C++, Ada, etc. That list's very short and it includes neither Brainfuck nor Rust for that matter.

The point is: neither of those two datapoints is a particularly useful metric on how "serious" a programming language is and much less even a useful metric on how well it is suited to any given task. Even how mainstream programming languages are is not a useful signal for that. Javascript is very much mainstream, but I hope no one ever will want to program a cars ECU in a JS dialect. Specialized applications are almost by definition the realm of specialized languages.

Of course most rational engineering organizations wouldn't choose Brainfuck because it's harder to write code that other people can evaluate. But it's not automatically out of the question if you have a good reason for its use.

I did a fair bit of development in C, and developed hard real time systems in VHDL that did involve life & death, but, wouldn't call any language used in the industry generating value as a non serious language...

Off the top of my head I thought C++ and Ada. However, you mention VHDL which I agree with and somebody else pointed out Javascript which is also a good point. The Javascript example (along with C++) make the point that serious computer languages are not necessarily great languages.

I would argue that Rust is not a serious language (at the moment [1]) because its still young, there is no specification and if anything happens to the one implementation it would be a disaster.

Despite C being a null pointer minefield, if someone was to sue a developer the argument could be made that it is an industry standard. In the less likely event that a Rust program hurt somebody what are you going to say?

[1] https://users.rust-lang.org/t/is-there-a-plan-to-get-a-forma...

In practice, though, V8 is the serious impementation. The interesting thing about C and C++ is that I don't know if any given dev is using Clang, GCC, or MSVC until I ask him. I know a JS dev is using V8.

"The Rust development team isn't interested in supporting your obscure embedded architecture" or "sorry, this platform was phased out due to technical debt" is what I mean by not serious.

Look at Python and how any attempts to make alternative interpreter implementations ultimately failed. (And they at least have PEPs.)

> And they at least have PEPs.

Rusts language development has been guided by RFCs since like the beginning. There's no comprehensive standard as in "somebody went and wrote down the current state", but it's also not the case that there's no written spec of how things should behave. You could base a new compiler on that and there's actually developments to have different backends to rustc. Cranelift for example https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime/blob/main/crane...

> "The Rust development team isn't interested in supporting your obscure embedded architecture" or "sorry, this platform was phased out due to technical debt" is what I mean by not serious.

So any compiler team that stops supporting some sort of architecture because it's either rare or no longer worth the effort is not serious in your opinion? Like GCC, that has a decision making matrix for that? https://gcc.gnu.org/backends.html And dropped various architectures along the way?

The fact that a specific corporation has implemented a specific project by using a specific tool is completely meaningless as to the appropriateness of using that tool in another context.

> The fact that a specific corporation has implemented a specific project by using a specific tool is completely meaningless as to the appropriateness of using that tool in another context.

You're entirely correct. That's another goalpost move - nobody proclaimed that being used for business critical projects makes rust in any way magically fit for any and all other conceivable projects.

a) the fact that a corporation uses a language is meaningless and can't be used as an argument for anything - except maybe what to learn if you want to get a job there.

b) that all arguments based on Rust's novelty, call it "serious language" "mainstream language" or whatever - have merit. Rust is obviously not mature enough for many potential users and you can't convince them by talking about RFCs.

I disagree with you here. This is a low level production grade application in a domain that requires secure and stable operation. The fact that a team picked a specific language for this application demonstrates a certain level of stability and suitability for various problem domains. There are more examples of large scale rust codebases. That does not imply that rust is magically suited to all problems or that you should pick rust for your project at all cost and without further consideration, but it does mean that rust is used in “serious” projects that have significant monetary value attached to it.

> b) that all arguments based on Rust's novelty, call it "serious language" "mainstream language" or whatever - have merit. Rust is obviously not mature enough for many potential users and you can't convince them by talking about RFCs.

You’re again arguing against points I never made. Rust has no ISO standard - true. But the point I was responding to was “the implementation is the spec” and that’s plain false. The RFC is written first and the implementation is tested against the RFC. There is a written document that specified expected behavior. Sometimes you need to follow the chain if RFCs modify existing behavior and there’s certainly cases where the implementation doesn’t follow the RFCs, but it not like all c compilers are 100% spec compliant all of the time.