Wrote a small amount of Rust over the holidays and, oddly, enjoyed it?
If you’d asked me a month ago I would have said I simply do not have fun writing in low-level languages, but I would have secretly thought: The actual problem is C, a bad language that is unpleasant to deal with. Now I feel the same way but am more confident in it.
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"
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.