Why Pascal is not my favorite programming language (1981) [pdf]

The 80s war between C and Pascal, has been resolved, each side gave its arguments, the judge of history has decided that the clear winner was C.

The new battle has begun with three major contenders: C, Golang, and Rust. Which one will be chosen for the future?

It won't be C. The reason as I see it is because of commodification. Executives want things as cheap and drop-in as possible. With C, you need a certain amount of skill. With a language like Rust that advertises memory-safety, they like that because it means you don't need as much skill anymore.

A similar thing is happening with game engines. If everyone is taught Unreal engine then you don't get in-house engines anymore which requires skill, because it's easier and cheaper to get some replaceable grunt to implement it in Unreal, perhaps with some off-the-shelf assets, which is perceived as "good enough".

It will be interesting to see how AI generation of code changes development tooling and the skills required.

> With C, you need a certain amount of skill. With a language like Rust that advertises memory-safety, they like that because it means you don't need as much skill anymore.

this is a surprising statement --- in tust you need to formalize the flow of mutability, which is a skill requirement.

so why do you think rust for the boss seems cheaper than C?

I can't give you a non-speculative answer because in truth, my coding is from the Pascal era.

The way I look at it in terms of cheaper is that you don't need to be as careful, less need to worry about memory leaks which lead to exploits, etc. I.e. you don't have to track every little thing yourself.

Starting to make inroads with larger projects now.. Firefox's audio subsystem is in Rust, while Chromium's is C++ (w/ tools to help detect leaks).

Yeah, looking back at history, the wrong side often won.