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0 pointshnlmorg8d ago0 comments

If you believe that then you haven’t spent much time working in different paradigms of programming languages.

Syntax is the easy stuff to learn. It’s any shifts in paradigms (eg pure functional vs imperative vs logic… etc) that takes time to learn.

And I say this as someone who’s written professional software in well over a dozen different languages. So I understand well the challenges learning something new.

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2ndorderthought8d ago

I have written production code in about a dozen languages as well believe it or not.

I have also trained people who were good to decent software engineers in other languages to write rust. The syntax is nontrivial for a lot of people. There are a lot of people who gave up trying to learn rust, especially before the rust book became what it is today.

People typically fight the borrowchecker until it clicks. Learning from an LLM and reading only means you have to be as good as the rust compiler without any experience writing the language. It's got to be way harder that way.

hnlmorgOP8d ago

> I have written production code in about a dozen languages as well believe it or not.

You said 6 in your other comment. Which is half a dozen.

But I take your point about the syntax being complex. That was the main reason I stopped coding in Rust: not because I couldn’t learn the language but because I didn’t enjoy the complexity. To me it felt like it needed someone to reign in design choices (Python is suffering from this problem now too).

On a slight tangent: one of my pet peeves is feature creep in programming languages. It makes it harder to learn the language. Harder to agree on coding styles in teams. Easier to fuck up and thus requires you to be on your A-game when writing code for it. I don’t always agree with Go’s choices, but I respect that the language is conservative in what gets approved into the language. This is a takeaway more languages need to learn from.

Anyway, back on topic: I don’t agree that the syntax and borrow checker constitutes as “a different paradigm”. But I’ll concede that I might be overstating how easy it is for others to learn these idioms.

2ndorderthought8d ago

The number depends on if you count html/css, bash, powershell, etc as programming languages.

I don't blame your choice to walk away from rust. It is more complex than other languages. I like it because it makes the complexity explicit. Other people really do not. Both views are valid.

I think that explicit nature for memory handling is a paradigm change. Though I do understand that the definition of programming paradigms isn't really inclusive of that. But it introduces changes to how the language is composed, run, and compiles that aren't a part of other paradigms necessarily.

Eg, It's not a lint to have a use after free for rust. It's part of the acceptable subset of the language and must be expressed in the code.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

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2ndorderthought8d ago

I have written production code in about a dozen languages as well believe it or not.

hnlmorgOP8d ago

> I have written production code in about a dozen languages as well believe it or not.

You said 6 in your other comment. Which is half a dozen.

2ndorderthought8d ago

The number depends on if you count html/css, bash, powershell, etc as programming languages.

I don't blame your choice to walk away from rust. It is more complex than other languages. I like it because it makes the complexity explicit. Other people really do not. Both views are valid.

Eg, It's not a lint to have a use after free for rust. It's part of the acceptable subset of the language and must be expressed in the code.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse