Comment by PeterWhittaker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PeterWhittaker | Hacker News Reader

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If you say so. Considering that you can define the basics of a memory and thread safety for free JSON parser in a single enum in Rust, and derive a lot of utility functions, where C would take a lot more code, and the code would be riskier, well, I'm just going to keep enjoying working in the language. It has a lovely balance of power and conciseness.

There is a huge learning curve to Rust, one that I am still climbing, but I haven't been as excited learning and working with a new language since 1987 when I learned C afters years of working with Pascal, Fortran, and a number of procedural job control systems.

In the years since, I've written large complex programs and systems in C, JS, bash, and PowrShell, and so far Rust feels like my new forever home, my defauly go to.

I'm glad of this, because my industry is heading to memory-safe, compiled languages, and the others I've experienced don't work for me. It's aesthetic, mostly, I guess, but Rust just makes sense.

And there you go, you've passed the line. In response to a suggestion that maybe you could tone it down a bit, you just repeat the party line again, because a slight opening has been spotted and by golly you're not going to let that pass!

You're hurting more than you're helping at this point.

And, just in case you're having trouble following along, as the evidence rather suggests that you are, note that replying with yet another paeon to Rust will be really missing the point.

Well, it's nice on this side of the line.

There is no party line, and there is no tone. There are over 30 years of experience with C, not all of it pleasant, though most of it productive, and, comparatively speaking, amazing recent experiences with Rust. I do have to shift my thinking from how I would solve problems in C, because the memory management paradigm is so different, but, thanks in part to deep dives into scoping in other languages in pursuit of pernicious bugs, once I make that shift, problems are easier to solve in Rust: The language and the compiler, hand in glove, do a lot of the work for you.

You can carp all you like, and that is all it is, carping, not criticism, we'll just happily work along getting a lot done in less time.

If you want to advocate for things, you should learn more about social cues. Blatently missing them this badly hurts your advocacy and pushes people away. This is not unique to the Rust community, and it isn't universal to the Rust community by any means, I know you're a minority, but you people who just beat on people like this are hurting far more than you are helping.

To me it seems like you are passing a different line, into downright anti-rust hysteria, as if it is some sort of taboo to talk positively about it, or argue about its merits.

Your earlier comment, that his advocacy passes into parody, also seems silly to me. Perhaps you don't believe Rust's merits, and that's fine. Perhaps you don't believe the grandparent, and that's fine too. But either way, his argument was fair.

Edit: I later realized that my comment is mostly just an attack that doesn't really add anything to this thread. I apologize for that.

To add something to it, I'd just like to second that Rust is indeed very easy to write after learning to deal with the borrow checker. Much, much easier than C, and I say that with 15 years of writing various applications in C (with all of the autotools rituals, pthreads, Glib gobject nonsense, GTK/GDK/cairo, etc).

I had a fun little code battle with a colleague, and here's a comparison of Rust [1] vs Python [2]. Although Rust is certainly nowhere near as readable as Python, it was just as easy to write, due to the type-system saving on debugging/learning time.

[1] https://gist.github.com/andreivasiliu/a4a2a6007d1659799b1f80...

[2] https://gist.github.com/lemon24/252ee6aa122a2b38395b096f96cb...

The argument is fair... in a different context.

Monomaniacally monopolizing the topic is anti-social behavior.

I mention this because apparently you could use a bit of clue on that as well. You're actively pushing people away from Rust at this point when you resist the clue stick this hard.

I see. Yes, I will admit that I see the context as being perfectly fine.

It started as a misguided comment that takes a tongue-in-cheek statement but believes it is unironic, followed by a comment saying it was tongue-in-cheek, there is some truth to it, but that truth is hard to believe, and then finally PeterWhittaker's comment, which argues that it should not be that hard to believe after all.

All in a thread that is mostly about Rust.

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