TWiR quote of the week

most of the quotes in this thread are very positive and sometimes funny, but looking at the original post from feburary 2015 above, we're supposed to also submit "insightful" stuff. so i guess the following one qualifies, even though it's kind of sad.

The number of crates which can be charitably described as a " barely functional list of the author's opinions wrapped around a project's c-api " is mind numbing. Picking a crate for a new problem domain is like walking through a mine-field. It feels like (when official options are not available) I need to dedicated ~3-4 weeks to just selecting and patching the dependencies I'm going to use for a project so I can be responsibly confident in them.

-- valarauca14 on reddit thread titled What do you miss about other languages when working in Rust?

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on a more ironic note, there's also

& * 'a &'a Box || macro! mod crate extern crate #[...] String vs &str &self unwrap expect ? Rc Arc

by new community member @yjoking on this thread

src

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"nau pli us : the first larval stage of many crustaceans, having an unsegmented body and a single eye."

At last, the proper term for a new Crustacean! (emphasis added)

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I like "Nauplius"! :heart:
Obligatory Wikipedia link (after digging through a handful of redirects): Crustacean larva - Wikipedia
Several larval stages were apparently originally mistaken for separate species, and even today we don't know the match-up between all larvae and all adults. (Much like how Rust-the-language is still figuring things out!)

Plural is apparently Latin-style: "nauplii".

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(emphasis added to last sentence)

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Summoning a Rust djinn, @alice:

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I have no idea how to debug Rust, because in 2 years of Rust, I haven't had that type of low level bug.

papaf on hackernews, in response to Are there any anecdotal stories about how Rust programs have fewer errors?

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Interesting question. One does not generally tell many anecdotal stories about bad things not happening :slight_smile:

Yet they dislike Rust... :man_shrugging:

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Hey, I can feel them! I love debugging! That feeling of leading an investigation, slowly uncovering the truth of what happened, why it happened, and how to make it right. And now, there's this new language that comes in and robs us of that pleasure?! I mean, I can see where they're coming from :slight_smile:

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Rust is simply a masterpiece. It is an amazing achievement of programming language design and implementation. There is nothing else like it.

Eric in My exploration of Rust and .NET

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While not Rust-related, I thought this quote had a balance of funny and insightful that may fit "quotes the community likes". Either way, it's worth more eyes.

It's a reply to ESR's 2008 retrospective on The Unix-Haters Handbook:

No, Python is not Scheme with funky syntax. Python is decrypted Perl.

That’s probably its biggest strength and a significant weakness as well.
-- Jeff Read @ The Unix Hater’s Handbook, Reconsidered – Armed and Dangerous

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One more from way down the cascade of comments of... variable quality:

I have concluded that the correct way, of thinking about OS’s is not as grand building designed and built for a purpose, with majestic skylines, but as city infrastructure, with streets and sewers, that should just work. However people will only notice your system when you overflow into the basement. A infrastructure that is not over taxed is in a city that is not growing, if your OS sucks because it is being taken places that won’t considered when it was first build, well there are worse fates.
-- Joe @ The Unix Hater’s Handbook, Reconsidered – Armed and Dangerous

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Those quotes are hardly "of the week."

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Based on past submissions, I was under the impression that "of the week" could be relaxed into "that were discovered that week". (Though, admittedly, usually it was more "posted a week or two before the week of submission".)

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(Edit: a few days late, sorry; posted 9 days ago, bit didn't read it until just now)

CAD97 embraces the "confession" part of the Rust Confessional topic.

I like how it demonstrates the... perverse? effect of the Rust Community social standards: "came here for a quick joke, accidentally contributed meaningfully to the discussion.." is such a nice problem to have when interacting on the internet! :heart: @CAD97

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...that said, if you'd prefer something recent, here's an observation that just got posted while I was sleeping:

Most companies in general only go far enough for security to the point that people are either unaware of the dangers or it appeases the common masses. That's generally why whenever serious vulnerabilities are revealed, they essentially "campaign" for them, coming up with catchy names like "Heartbleed" for example, so companies are basically forced into getting them fixed.
-- computerquip on Phoronix Forums

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Rust is funny because in one sense it's hard and clunky. However, it's only ever precisely as hard and clunky as it needs to be . Everywhere something can be made more concise, or readable, or convenient, without sacrificing any control, it has been. Anytime something is hard or inconvenient, it's because the underlying domain really is exactly that hard or inconvenient.

Contrast this with other languages, which are often clunky when they don't need to be and/or "easy" when they shouldn't be.

brundolf on Hacker News

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Incidentally, having suffered under the limitations of coherent typeclasses while programming in Rust, I at least personally think they are far more trouble than they’re worth.

Although probably a proper quote would have to be the whole three paragraphs - rather too long for QOTW.

1 Like