Comment by anymouse123456 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anymouse123456 | Hacker News Reader

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100% agree that we should always be trying new approaches, ideas and perspectives. I'm all for trying new things and this Cambrian explosion of programming languages we're living through is a wonderful time to be alive.

I just do not happen to agree with the crowd that seems to be believe the only value that matters is safety. I think there are many other values that are in tension with safety and that these should be more reasonably balanced against one another. I sincerely hope that Rust does not represent the end of history for programming language evolution.

That said, I think you raise a really useful historical perspective. C did indeed feel like dead weight to many people. There were many detractors who felt computers weren't (and would never be) fast enough for such a high level language to be practical and as languages became more and more high level, there have been very similar concerns raised at every rung.

We have recently entered a period where natural human language is the input that resolves at least some subset of software creation problems.

Author here, and I agree that Rust shouldn't represent the end of history for programming language evolution. Vehemently. I have been saying for the better part of a decade now that I hope very much Rust is the first of a new breed of memory-safe systems-level languages, and that I also believe that we can do better with learnings from Rust as a stepping stone. Safety is really important along some of the axes I called out in the piece (“can you hand this to an unsupervised junior, or for that matter me on a bad day?”) but it is not the only important axis, and indeed Rust’s success has been in part because of many other very important things it got more right than predecessors or competitors in the same space (Cargo!).

But I am immensely encouraged to see Swift and Hylo and Vale all taking swings at the same problem space with very different emphases and approaches, and while I differ with Zig on some fundamentals I can totally imagine a language that grabs many of its good ideas along many of those from Rust which Zig drops, and goes somewhere better than either has managed so far.

I don't, though, agree at all about natural language solving problems here—rather the opposite, in fact. I think that in many cases, things like memory safety (and other kinds of safety!) are going to be more important to solve at language and framework level in a world where there is massively more code generated by prompting LLMs.

I seem to stumble into so many of the religious zealots, that it's really encouraging to see this from a Rust proponent.

I completely agree with you about natural language not solving the problem. That was a sentence out of a much larger paragraph that I deleted and then mistakenly submitted on my way out the door.

Thanks for catching it!

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