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Matt Godbolt sold me on Rust by showing me C++

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611 points LorenDB | 2 comments | 06 May 25 17:51 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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choeger ◴[07 May 25 06:42 UTC] No.43912866[source]▶
All this has been known in the PL design community for decades if not half a century by now.

Two things are incredibly frustrating when it comes to safety in software engineering:

1. The arrogance that "practitioners" have against "theorists" (everyone with a PhD in programming languages)

2. The slowness of the adoption of well-tested and thoroughly researched language concepts (think of Haskell type classes, aka, Rust traits)

I like that Rust can pick good concepts and design coherent language from them without inventing its own "pragmatic" solution that breaks horribly in some use cases that some "practitioners" deem "too theoretical."

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blub ◴[07 May 25 14:31 UTC] No.43916215[source]▶
If the practitioners haven’t adopted what you’re offering for 50+ years, that thing can’t be good.

Rust is also struggling with its “too theoretical” concepts by the way. The attempts of the community to gaslight the practitioners that the concepts are in fact easy to learn and straightforward are only enjoying mild success, if I may call it that.

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1. fsloth ◴[07 May 25 17:48 UTC] No.43918668[source]▶
”If the practitioners haven’t adopted what you’re offering for 50+ years, that thing can’t be good.”

I don’t think what features are popular in C++ is good indication of anything. The language is good only due to the insane amounts of investment to the ecosystem, not because of the language features due to design.

For an industrial language inventory of ”nice features to have” F# and C# are mostly my personal gold standard.

”Too theoretical” is IMO not the correct lens to use. I would propose as a better lens a) which patterns you often use b) how to implement them in language design itself.

A case in point is the gang-of-four book. It mostly gives names to things in C++ that are language features in better languages.

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2. senderista ◴[07 May 25 20:41 UTC] No.43920356[source]▶
The GoF book uses Smalltalk for the examples as well as C++, and Smalltalk is about the most expressive imperative language you could ask for.