Re:The biggest threat to Rust's sustainability
by littlestymaar on Saturday March 20, 2021 @05:32PM
(#26526207)
> the dude made a wrong turn with Rust and didn't with Zig.
Yes, this one guy made a wrong turn once. If you want to conclude from one user making a mistake that a language is complex then you're just going to conclude that programming is complex … Everyday, with every language under the sun, people make mistakes, great discovery.
I'm not blaming “the user®” here, I'm blaming the blog post writer who makes a mistake and concludes that his tool is responsible for it and that he should tell the world how bad the tool is.
> Like I said, without metrics we're just trading subjective anecdotes.
Well that sentence is pretty ironic given the previous one, nevermind.
> We could compare the sizes of compilers for C and Rust.
I wonder what conclusion you'd draw from such a comparison. That assembly is the least complex language in existence, followed by Brainfuck and Chicken?
> We could teach each to different randomized groups of students and see how quickly people learn to write (safe!) code in each.
Oh I actually like this one. For Rust, you'd need to run a study to find out, but for C the answer is trivial: Never. Nobody on earth know how to write safe C. Not even DJB, not even Theo de Raadt, or Richard Hipp, or Brad Spengler. For almost 50 years, the brightest minds of computer science have tried to write safe C code, and consistently failed. Can we conclude that this language is a little bit too complex for humans, or should we wait a few decades more?
Yes, this one guy made a wrong turn once. If you want to conclude from one user making a mistake that a language is complex then you're just going to conclude that programming is complex … Everyday, with every language under the sun, people make mistakes, great discovery.
I'm not blaming “the user®” here, I'm blaming the blog post writer who makes a mistake and concludes that his tool is responsible for it and that he should tell the world how bad the tool is.
> Like I said, without metrics we're just trading subjective anecdotes.
Well that sentence is pretty ironic given the previous one, nevermind.
> We could compare the sizes of compilers for C and Rust.
I wonder what conclusion you'd draw from such a comparison. That assembly is the least complex language in existence, followed by Brainfuck and Chicken?
> We could teach each to different randomized groups of students and see how quickly people learn to write (safe!) code in each.
Oh I actually like this one. For Rust, you'd need to run a study to find out, but for C the answer is trivial: Never. Nobody on earth know how to write safe C. Not even DJB, not even Theo de Raadt, or Richard Hipp, or Brad Spengler. For almost 50 years, the brightest minds of computer science have tried to write safe C code, and consistently failed. Can we conclude that this language is a little bit too complex for humans, or should we wait a few decades more?