Stop making me memorize the borrow checker

> Rust is not the answer, it is simply a step towards the answer.

True that.

On one hand, it's amazing. On the other hand, the nagging feeling that we still have work to go in programming language design has not gone away.

There is no answer. There are only improvements.

Two examples of things I want, built-in on day one, in some future language:

Structured concurrency. Don't provide "legacy" mechanisms and "opt in" for structure, just bite the bullet. Like the first language which told people no, we don't "go-to" other functions, that's not happening in my language, that was structured program flow I want structured concurrency, it's a thing but it's not yet popular enough to do that as the only provided concurrency, it should be.

Smart arithmetic. Your computer has Floating Point math. FP math is fast, but, it's hard for humans to think about exactly where they lose precision and performance while using it. I should be able to write the real mathematics I want, specify the precision I need and possibly the performance trades I'm comfortable with, and the compiler not me the programmer, figures out how to use FP math to calculate my mathematics with acceptable precision or tells me that I made demands it couldn't meet or which are nonsensical.

On the other hand, two things I really liked to see when I learned Rust:

&[T]: The slice reference type, a fat pointer which specifies where zero or more contiguous Ts are, and, how many of them. This is the Right Thing™ and it's right there in the core language design, which means you don't need to go back and retro-fit it.

String: The simplest possible way to build the growable text type, as a growable array of bytes but with the strict requirement that the array's content is always UTF-8 text. Is the "Small String Optimization" a cool trick? Yeah, but it need not live in this core vocabulary type. How about Copy-on-write ? Ditto. What about other text encodings? Transcode at the edges if you need that.

I sincerely believe that it is nearly impossible to have an objective and constructive conversation about the merits of programming languages, because the language of choice becomes part of people's worldview.

So it's like discussing politics or religion. People think that they have objective views, but they can't overcome their beliefs. That's just how beliefs work. They almost never change.

Also, beliefs are tied to groups. Humans automatically adopt the beliefs of their group, at least to some degree. Or they learn to shut up about their disagreements.

This is a thread for Rust critics and Rust advocates. Try to seriously sell F# or some other ML-like language in here and you are going to end up annoying both the C++ people and the Rust people.

The world will be a better place when the AIs finally take over. If we survive.

In my opinion, it seems like you may be taking random internet discussions a bit too seriously; I don't actually expect too much meaningful programming language discourse to occur in Hacker News comments. I think the reason why I keep coming here is in part because it's one of the rare public forums where occasionally some truly interesting discussions really do happen, but don't forget Sturgeon's Law. For better or worse, public and open forums are rarely productive places to have discussions, and a lot of the real innovations certainly seem to happen behind closed doors. (Personally I greatly prefer public forums for discussion, and even would prefer anonymity if it were feasible, but I take what I can get.)

What does that say about participating here? Well, for me, sometimes when I write a comment that I feel is constructive, reasonable, and honest, it goes gray anyways, and it's easy to chalk it up to people just irrationally downvoting it because they don't like my opinion. It's also pretty easy to do this, I just need to be cynical about Apple or optimistic about the Go programming language, or something similar, and there's some percentage chance it will go negative depending on presumably who sees it first. It's not going to stop me from doing so, and ultimately it's pretty inconsequential, as I'm just some guy and my opinions are not really that important anyways.

Somehow, even though I have all of this internalized, I can't help but go 30 nested replies deep into threads debating about something senseless and unimportant, but it almost feels like it wouldn't be the Internet without debates like that. XKCD 386.