TWiR quote of the week

[steffahn]

I feel like, the way Reddit links posts without visible context by default is causing confusion here. This is the link to the comment with context. (Starting with some deleted post whose contents we can only guess^[1].) The quoted response here was 4 comments deep in a joke discussion between Sage and Manishearth.

Click to show quoted full discussion

@(comment deleted)

"We've not read the feedback yet. We pinky swear to be more open on the process going forward, but not yet, gotta lawyer up first. pls stop yelling ;_;"

@Manishearth

Yes, they got a ton of feedback, of course they haven't read it all yet. They're giving out a very useful signal here: they acknowledge there are problems and want to fix them, as opposed to a situation where they're intending to push forward without further community input, which was what a lot of the community was uncertain about.

Would you like them to rush this? Because I do not think we can expect more from them at this point, this is going to be a slow process, especially since as far as I understand it whenever they want to actually draft things (or figure out if something can be expressed in the trademark policy) they need to talk to a (probably not cheap) lawyer.

@Sage (rabidferret)

Manish if you don't want us to rush this why are you dming me asking if we're done yet

@Manishearth

sage why are you wasting time on reddit when you could be finishing the next draft, hmmm???

@Sage (rabidferret)

You don't want to see my draft. It's too spicy to ever see the light of day. You have to scream "trans rights" while wearing a crab costume before you're allowed to say "Rust" on a phone call with your mom

@Manishearth

wonderful, ship it

That being said, I would personally agree that perhaps a (self-described) shitpost is not necessarily the best quote of the week… even more so if it’s heavily contextual

---

1. or look up on archive sites… ↩︎

[Sophie]

1. procmacroable /ˌprɔkˈmækroʊəbəl/ a. Implementable as a procedural macro.

­(Mara on GitHub)

[pickfire]

That said, I really like the language. It’s as if someone set out to design a programming language, and just picked all the right answers. Great ecosystem, flawless cross platform, built-in build tools, no “magic”, static binaries, performance-focused, built-in concurrency checks. Maybe these “correct” choices are just laser-targeted at my soul, but in my experience, once you leap over the initial hurdles, it all just works™️, without much fanfare.

Writing a Fast C# Code-Search Tool in Rust — John Austin

[edomaur]

"The goal isn’t to have an eternally good programming languages; the goal is to have tools now."

from Rust: A New Attempt at C++'s Main Goal :: The Coded Message by Jimmy Hartzell

[piegames]

How to access vector from multiple threads without mutex?

For every "I know what I am doing", there's a corresponding "well, actually".

[Michael-F-Bryan]

From Concerns about embedded real time linux using rust

@parasyte

Since it hasn't been said before, there is an important distinction that needs to be addressed. For anyone who has been doing embedded work for any length of time and hasn't yet been exposed to Rust, the only thing that can really be said is that the language is entirely unlike everything you've experienced before. There is just nothing comparable, and the only way to rationalize questions like why use Rust at all is to put some honest effort into learning and using it.

Hearing things like "it's a bit like C++ except it's memory safe and thread safe, and it's actually practical to build kernels with it" will not sound convincing. You have to see it to believe it.

It's as if you've spent an entire career writing assembly, and one day you hear something or other about a brand-new programming language claiming to be a "portable assembler" called C. It sounds too good to be true. And then the years pass, and all of the mystery and disbelief gives way to obviousness and precision engineering. That's sort of how it is when going from C to Rust.

[Cerber-Ursi]

As the Captain Anton Fetisov once said,

@afetisov

Rust has better than a standard. Rust has Miri

(the rest of the paragraph is good too, but cut like this is just too good of a cultural reference to miss)

[evanm]

Thanks to all for the very helpful responses. "The Book" says The community is very welcoming and happy to answer students’ questions "; I expected that to be just marketing, but I was wrong.

By @Daryl in w\Why is it called "unit"?

[josh]

"That's one of the great things about Rust: sometimes you can do something really dumb and get away with it."

-- Rik Arends at RustNL, talking about code optimization or the lack thereof

[bugaevc]

I do wish that people could see Rust as more than a better C/C++. It's an amazing language for web services and CLIs.

It's not just that it doesn't have a GC. It also doesn't have some of the worst features of OOP, it also has a sane std library, it also has an expressive type system, etc. Rust helps you write better code, even when compared to languages like Java or Python.

insanitybit on Hacker News

[ZiCog]

@bugaevc

Rust helps you write better code, even when compared to languages like Java or Python.

That is an odd comparison to me. Java does very little to help write better code, Python even less. A comparison to something like Ada would be more fitting.

[bugaevc]

This is what I get for taking a quote out of context

The parent comment compared Rust to C/C++; the one I quoted argues that Rust shines not only as a C/C++ replacement, but also when compared to higher level languages and applied to tasks where you wouldn't typically be reaching for C/C++ (web services).

[afetisov]

...some people found error messages they couldn't ignore more annoying than wrong results, and, when judging the relative merits of programming languages, some still seem to equate "the ease of programming" with the ease of making undetected mistakes.

On the foolishness of "natural language programming", E.W. Dijkstra

[stonerfish]

@jhpratt

It's in response to Manish, who undoubtedly knows Sage (and vice versa); it's not a mocking at all.

It was a public post and making joke using a marginalized community.

[steffahn]

Due to the nature of this thread, I think it's best to – if possible – avoid answering to posts too far back

[vincentdephily]

These open-source projects show that Rust provides both high performance and pace of development while also attracting a lot of contributors. There is a long-standing tradition of developing tooling for a programming language using that language. Rust breaks from this tradition quite effectively.

There are a few other possible quotes in the article, worth reading in full.

Rust Reviewed: The Current Trends and Pitfalls of the Ecosystem

[stonerfish]

Yeah. I spaced out and didn't notice the date.

[jjpe]

From an exchange I had over here.

@blonk

@jjpe

It also had no killer application aside from safety

Somewhat ironic wording, considering Ada is still used in high-assurance applications where a failure may lead to literal death. Killer applications is exactly the type of thing that Ada is avoiding!

[LeoniePhiline]

I'd like to propose this quote from the Rust matrix channel as quote of the week:

As sometimes we need to remember to care for life beyond our software.

[jhpratt]

@H2CO3

Programmers have been arguing for decades whether it is sharing xor mutability causes memory safety bugs:

• "It's threads!" – shouted JavaScript and Python, and JS remained single-threaded, and Python introduced the GIL.
• "It's mutability!" – screamed Haskell and Erlang, and they made (almost) everything immutable.

And then along came Rust, and said: "you are fools! You can have both sharing and mutability in the same language, as long as you isolate them from each other."

.