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Comment by pie_flavor | Hacker News Reader

It should not be strange that a tool which is better in every way and makes your code less buggy by default has its praises sung by most of the people who use it. It would be odd to go around saying 'electric drills are strangely and disproportionately pushed at Home Depot over the good old hand auger', and even if I don't work at your contracting company I'd be slightly unnerved about you working on my house.

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I’ve heard this analogy used to justify firing developers for not using GenAI: a cabinet maker who doesn’t use power tools shouldn’t be working as a cabinet maker.

If only programming languages (or GenAI) were tools like hammers and augers and drills.

Even then the cabinets you see that come out of shops that only use hand tools are some of the most sturdy, beautiful, and long lasting pieces that become the antiques. They use fewer cuts, less glue, avoid using nails and screws where a proper joint will do, etc.

Less glue and avoidance of nails and screws doesn't make it sturdier. Fastening things strongly makes your furniture sturdier than not doing so. Antiques suck as often as they don't, and moreover you are only seeing the ones that survived without a base rate to compare it to; they succeeded in spite of power tools, but power tools would have made the same object better.

Comparing it to AI makes no sense. Invoking it is supposed to bring to mind the fact that it's worse in well-known ways, but then the statement 'better in every way' no longer applies. Using Rust passively improves the engineering quality compared to using anything else, unlike AI which sacrifices engineering quality for iteration speed.

> Less glue and avoidance of nails and screws doesn't make it sturdier. Fastening things strongly makes your furniture sturdier than not doing so.

No disrespect intended, but your criticism of the analogy reveals that you are speaking from assumptions, but not knowledge, about furniture construction.

In fact, less glue, and fewer fasteners (i.e. design that leverages the strength of the materials), is exactly how quality furniture is made more sturdy.

There was an interesting video on YT where an engineer from a fastener company joined a carpenter to compare their products with traditional joints.

The traditional joints held up very well and even beat the engineered connectors in some cases. Additionally one must be careful with screws and fasteners: if they’re not used according to spec, they may be significantly weaker than expected. The presented screws had to be driven in diagonally from multiple positions to reach the specified strength; driving them straight in, as the average DIYer would, would have resulted in a weak joint.

Glue is typically used in traditional joinery, so less glue would actually have a negative effect.

> Glue is typically used in traditional joinery, so less glue would actually have a negative effect.

And a lot of traditional joinery is about keeping the carcase sufficiently together even after the hide glue completely breaks down so that it can be repaired.

Modern glues allow you to use a lot less complicated joinery.

The thing is that more than a few people disagree that it is better in every way.

I'm very much into Rust but this article is precisely about the fact that Rust is not "better in every way"...

This article was written nine years ago, when Rust 1.0 was two years old, by an author who spent a small (but nonzero) amount of time evaluating Rust.

This page was last updated on 2025-05-09 15:56:17Z

Given the author's misunderstanding of what Rust provides, the most charitable interpretation is that they haven't updated the parts discussing Rust since 2017. If they had, it would reflect more poorly on them.

Not true, the page is updated every now and again.

The most charitable interpretation of this is that the Reddit mods should stick to Reddit. If they had, this wouldn't have reflected so poorly on them.

The issue is that Rust proponents automatically assume that if you write enough C code, there will be memory related bugs.

In reality, this is not the case. Bad code is the result of bad developers. Id rather have someone writing C code that understands how memory bugs happen rather than a Rust developer thinking that the compiler is going to take care of everything for them.

The topic seems to be native programming languages -- I don't think any of the languages concerned are "better in every way" for every possible coding problem. Many will rightfully choose Fortran over Rust for their application -- knowing full well their choice is far away from "better in every way".

When writing code meant to last, you need a language that’s portable across compilers and through time. C has demonstrated both. Fortran 77 and 90 were portable across compilers, but are now at risk from breaking changes, and later versions are not very portable across compilers.

Bad analogy.

If the alternative has drawbacks (they always do) or is not as well known by the team, it's perfecly fine to keep using the tool you know if it is working for you.

People who incessantly try to evangelise their tool/belief/preferences to others are often seen as unpleasant to say the least and they often achieve the opposite effect of what they seek.

of course there are drawbacks to power tools. you could run out of battery for example and now its useless.

but everyone with a brain knows the costs are worth the benefits.

I was talking in general if that escaped you. Hence "beliefs/preferences" and not only tools.

And when it comes to programming languages, it's not as clear cut. As exemplified by the article.

So the power tools is a poor analogy.

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