Rust feels like it’s designed by people who actually care about what they’re doing and have paid full attention, which is the highest praise I can imagine giving software tooling.

Comparing it to C, a language where the usual error handling mechanism is “rename some integers to things in all caps that start with the letter E and insert them in-band”, a system that a dead iguana could see the problems with, seems almost unfair.

@vruba Writing good C code is hard. It can be done of course, but it takes a lot of effort, and still often bugs related to memory management or threading will remain. A programmer can write good code more efficiently when computers take over some of this burden, either at runtime or at compile-time such as with Rust.

@anji Every time someone refers to C as being well written, it looks to me like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wound_Man, except instead of injuries it’s code smells. But naturally this is a matter of taste.

@vruba Excel thinks everything is a date; C thinks everything is an address

@secretasianman People think “portable assembly” is some kind of exaggerated zinger but it’s just a charitable description.

@vruba I rather heartily agree. Such good developer ergonomics, even when it's being pedantic and cantankerous, it's trying its best to explain what the situation is.

@aredridel Yeah, I have no problem at all being yelled at by a compiler. The list of things that my computer does that annoy me runs for thousands of items before “got an error flagged because I wrote an error” appears.

@vruba Yeah though there's that middle ground of "you did something that is not wrong in other contexts but we're a bit artificially constraining things so we're absolutely positive it's right sorry about that"

@aredridel Fair.

@ian I may never know.