203 karma · joined October 24, 2012
And the Rust developers indeed deserve respect in my opinion too. They are trying to solve a hard problem and not taking the worse-is-better-option.
Perhaps one answer could be, that much of Rust's complexity arises from the concepts of 'borrowing' and 'lifetimes' and how they are encoded in the language.
In C++, complexity much of the complexity arises from the copy/reference semantics, and the possibility of overriding standard behaviour. You need to have wider context to understand local code. So you need to understand how the C++ works on quite a low level and you might need to know more specifics on your C++ codebase than might be the case in Rust.
There probably isn't any good single resource for learning all this, but perhaps getting some good textbook on computer hardware architecture might be good next step after reading the "Code". Unfortunately I don't have any immediate suggestions on the current crop - I remember learning from William Stallings' books some 15-20 years back - not sure if they are the best choice nowadays.
A Similar, but perhaps further evolved situation is in Hungary, where right-wing populists have held the power for quite a long. But even in Hungrary the rulings party's power is not absolute, at the moment, and you don't get thrown into jail for having wrong opinions.
And besides Scihub, there are emerging institutional solutions to this problem, like research funders demanding that research paid with public funds must be publicly available, and universities setting up academic repositories where papers published elsewhere are available in open access form.
Using Haskell for similar stuff is more tedious, even if a actual coding is more fun. I can see (and sometimes feel myself) the cognitive dissonance here.
Our next post examines how much urine splashes back on you when you use a urinal.
The range of articles is... interesting.
On the other hand, if you know basics of how to CPU works, what stack is, know binary and hexadecimal, and some C, you might be able to just read Dennis' book, just ignore things you don't get at first, since many things get explained later in the book, after which you can re-read sections you didn't quite understand first.
Some terms (opcode, ISA) are not really explained (except in the glossary) before they are used and there are perhaps too much detail in the expense of the bigger picture.
Criticisms aside, the book and the challenges seem interesting and the efforts of the author must be appreciated!
Docker seems to be moving forward really fast and gets a lot of hype which tend to make my old-school sysadmin self a bit suspicious, but I'd love to hear critique that is based on the actual usage. (N.B. I'm just about to start making my first Docker deployment)
Edit. Oh, and here's a previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2433860