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Comment by toprerules | Hacker News Reader

The similarities are striking. Both have a problem with undocumented or experimental modules for everyday tasks, both use compiler plugins to make sure that every package is using its own superset of the language (although in Rust this only applies to nightly), both tout lofty goals while rarely producing production grade systems. Rust is the first toe dip into the world of blog posts heralding the"coming of the age of reason" when we all see the error of our ways for writing dangling pointer references and impure functions. To be a complete cynic, I hope Rust runs right away from over generalized abstractions and the Haskell indifference to achieving real success by overcomplicting even the most mundane of problems.

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There's nothing wrong with the ability to generalize abstractions, the problem is when all you know are category theory everything looks like a zygohistomorphic prepromorphism.

Case in point, TypeScript and mypy. Both are adding more abstractions, more powerful types, more aspects, because people find/have fitting use cases for those features.

That doesn't mean let blah = document.getElementById("blah") ; blah.innerHTML = "..." or import requests ; requests.post(...) will become deprecated, but it means it'll be easier to express more things (like conditions/assumptions on shape or state of data, control flow, component dependencies) without boilerplate (and copy-paste), and maybe helping other developers make sure they cross all the t-s and dot all the i-s.

Does this have a cognitive cost? Yes, especially in Rust/Haskell.

Are there escape hatches? Yes, of course, like unsafe and whatever Haskell has.

Should a developer who isn't familiar with those assumptions/conditions work on the code base anyway? No, not really.

(Is Haskell ugly? Yes. :( )

The haskell escape hatches are the unsafe family of functions, such as unsafePerformIO

> rarely producing production grade systems.

https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/friends.html has been growing at a pretty hefty pace lately!

I think this is a little unfair on Rust. You can get a lot done using stable Rust.

Yes. Complex languages are not required to solve complex problems. This is why Go and JavaScript are so popular.

I'd say neither Go nor JavaScript are predominantly used to solve complex problems. The main use cases for both are solving mundane problems by mundane programmers. In case of Go that's an explicit design philosophy.

That's... not really true. JavaScript solves trivial problems, and it's mainly popular because it's literally the only web language around.

Although clearly presented to push some buttons, it isn't completely wrong.

Am upvote hoping you don't get buried.

it isn't completely wrong

It may get some of the facts right, but the tone is completely wrong. Cynicism is just a step or two away from nihilism. It's far, far easier to destroy than it is to create. The world needs more creators, not destroyers.

> Cynicism is just a step or two away from nihilism. It's far, far easier to destroy than it is to create. The world needs more creators, not destroyers.

Totally off topic:

Such a simple thing to say, but I thank you for it. I often want to do good, and spent time thinking about the problems in the world and how my path might help them, but I know that I am a massive cynic in many areas. Politics being a big one.

I have always agreed with your statement about creators vs destroyers, but nevertheless I've been a loud cynic. I need to reign that in. Thank you.

We need more people creating the right things, and more people destroying the wrong things and baggage that we've overburdened ourselves with.

Cynicism is a self-defense mechanism.

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