For what it’s worth, WSL 2 with VSCode is actually great. Almost all the benefits of Linux (I still miss true tiling window management), with fewer weird driver issues.
That said, I generally just use whatever my company wants me to use, and I haven’t worked somewhere that let us use native Linux boxes since 2014.
Every technology that gets used frequently enough facilitates maladaptation to its faults. 😑
[warning: “annoying Rust guy” comment incoming]
I don’t think Rust is perfect, but arguably I do “idolize” it, because I genuinely think it’s notably better both in design and in practice than every other language I’ve used. This includes:
In a literal sense, I agree that all (practical) languages “are flawed.” And there are things I appreciate about all of the above languages (…except Tcl/Tk), even if I don’t “like” the language overall. But I sincerely believe that statements like “all languages are flawed” and “use the best tool for the job” tend to imply that all (modern, mainstream) languages are equally flawed, just in different ways, which is absolutely not true. And in particular, it used to be true that all languages made tradeoffs between a fairly static, global set of binary criteria:
Looking at these, it’s pretty easy to see where most of the languages in my list above fall on each side of each of these criteria. What’s special about Rust is that the core language design prevents a relatively novel set of tradeoffs, allowing it to choose “both” for the first two criteria (though certainly not the latter three; the “ease-of-use” one is debatable) at the expense of higher implementation complexity and a steeper learning curve.
The great thing about this isn’t that Rust has “solved” the problem of language tradeoffs. It’s that Rust has broadened the space of available tradeoffs. The assumption that safety necessarily comes at a runtime cost was so pervasive prior to Rust that some engineers still believe it. But now, Rust has proven, empirically, that this is not the case! And so my ultimate hope for Rust isn’t that it becomes ubiquitous; it’s that it inspires even better languages, or at least, more languages that use concepts Rust has brought to the mainstream (such as sum-types) as a means to explore new design tradeoff spaces. (The standard example here is a language with a lightweight garbage-collecting runtime that also has traits, sum-types, and correct-by-default parallelism.)
There are other languages that, based on what I know about them, might inspire the same type of enthusiasm if I were to actually use them more:
…but, with the exception of Swift, these are all effectively “niche” languages. One notable thing about Rust is that its adoption has actually been rather astounding, by systems language standards. (Note that D and Ada never even got close to Rust’s popularity.)
This comment? https://fedia.io/m/programmer_humor@programming.dev/t/1239473/-/comment/7462582
I honestly do not understand what similarity you see between “this post seems like it will make linguists angry” and “the languages in this joke actually use English keywords and standard library names.” The post isn’t even about keywords and names.
Ah, right, the old “communism has never been tried”
To be pedantic, I didn’t ask a question, I just said I was surprised! I am still surprised.
Surprised nobody has complained so far about the Rust comparison. I guess any objection would appear to prove the point, or at least reinforce the “evangelist” stereotype.
From your comment, I’m not convinced you do get it. You wrote a lot of words completely beside the point of the joke, which is a series of analogies, not a statement about the natural languages involved in the creation of programming languages.
I wonder what the best programming analogue is for combining words into one where other languages keep them separate; maybe the functional-style chains of adapters?
Ah. Rust’s macros and the C preprocessor’s exist in vastly different universes. The C preprocessor is literally just a fancy programmatic copy-and-paste tool. Rust macros read the input source code and then execute other source code (the macro definition) to generate new source code that the compiler then reads.
I love Rust, but Rust macros are arguably more of a footgun than compile-time reflection would be, and as amazing as serde is (and no, there’s nothing comparable in standard-compliant C++ yet), there’s a strong argument that compile-time reflection would be a preferable technique for deriving serialization, argument-parsing, and similar feature.
What macros or attributes provide serialization in C++?
For runtime reflection, no, you’d specifically be able to do things that would be impossible to optimize out.
But the proposal is actually for static (i.e. compile-time) reflection anyway, so the original performance claim is wrong.
If you look at the proposal, this is specifically “static reflection”, i.e. compile-time reflection. So it doesn’t actually have any of the downsides you mention, as far as I can tell.
I read “happy ___ starts with ___” as stating that happiness was the eventual result of a process that started with ___.
Extension modules can be, and are, written in Rust and C++. And PyPy has a compatibility layer to run extensions (such as numpy) that are written for CPython.
The reason extension modules are typically in C is of course the API is in C, but that’s true of cffi as well (though you’re right that cffi is more portable). And the reason the API is in C is more fundamental than “CPython is written in C”.
The reason C becomes relevant to Python users isn’t typically because the interpreter is written in C, but because so many important libraries (especially numpy) are implemented in C.
I’m a Rust fan, and I do think they eventually struck a pretty good “visibility vs noise” balance with ? (which was highly controversial at the time).
I should have stressed the “opinion” part of “IMO”. What I mean is that, when I read this, it struck me immediately as being exactly correct: https://joeduffyblog.com/2016/02/07/the-error-model/
The problem is that most languages with exceptions treat that as the idiomatic error mechanism. So checked exceptions were invented, essentially, to do exactly what you say: add the exception type to the function signature.
Having separate errors-as-return-values and unwinding-for-emergencies is a much more recent trend (and, IMO, an obviously good development).
🤷 That wasn’t my experience, and I used it as my primary dev environment for four years.
It doesn’t go through a translation layer, though. WSL 2 has a whole separate kernel. You can even use GUI apps with Wayland.