> A critical element of puzzle languages is providing an escape, a way to admit that the pretty solution is elusive, and it's time to get working code regardless of aesthetics. It's interesting that these escapes tend to have a stigma; they induce a feeling of doing something wrong; they're guaranteed to result in pedantic lecturing if mentioned in a forum.
I immediately think of the borrow checker, and its escape called "unsafe" directly induces a feeling of doing something wrong. Yes, rust would be a puzzle language by this criteria.
Agreed. But, is this what accounts for the oft-seen condescension ?
> The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they're not researchers. They're typically fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They're not capable of understanding a brilliant language, but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt.