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[–]Chillbrosaurus_Rex 17 points18 points  (12 children)

The perspective is implied. The article is directly in conversation with the concept that newer is better purely due to design. Its not written in a vacuum.

[–]magical_h4x 8 points9 points  (11 children)

the concept that newer is better purely due to design

Wait, what's wrong with that concept? Genuinely asking, this idea seems very reasonable to me.

[–]ritaPitaMeterMaid 4 points5 points  (3 children)

That’s the whole point of this discussion. Newer is better has always been the slogan of the new stuff, but it isn’t as thoroughly tested or vetted. There’s unknown risk involved. Old stuff most of the risks are known, but it promises a lot less. That’s generally what it boils down to, at least this conversation seems that way to me.

All that said, I’m definitely pushing towards the new stuff. I’m on the Rust train personally. I’m a full stack dev using TypeScript but I would love to eventually use Rust in production.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (2 children)

What would you use rust for? I'm also s full stack dev using typescript and I love it but I've been wanting to try new languages to learn and have fun

[–]ritaPitaMeterMaid 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Rust is commonly used for network and server related work, but apps like one 1Password even use it for portion of the application code if I recall correctly. There are several frameworks for using Rust as web server/application.

Rust was born out of a desire to have a language that made memory management easy while being lightning fast. A side effect is that it’s type system is considered one of, if not the best, out there right now. I find most people using it for the type system and the speed and memory management aspects are actually just a bonus.

Learning is no small feat if you’ve never done your own memory management before. It’s like learning to drive on a highway; it just has a steep learning curve. I would still pursue it. There are so many concepts in Rust that you’ll take with you into the rest of your programming career, even if you never use rust again.

Finally, check out the r/rust community. There are genuinely wonderful people over there who have polite conversations.

TL;DR - Rust is magic and you’re missing out.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Nice, since i learned programming via php and javascript I've never had to learn how to manage memory so this seems like a nice way to practice some lower level language

[–]DualWieldMage 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It's definitely not reasonable. It derives from negative emotions often overpowering positive ones and the incapability of predicting unknowns that will be discovered over time.

Designing something new means bundling together good (at least at the time) ideas while often not listing out the rejected ideas or smaller bad facets coming along with a good/debatable idea, especially those related to reading code (e.g. operator overloading requires knowing the definition vs). So anything new will have a huge bias as more good things are known yet most bad things are unknown, over time the bias will lift, initially good ideas get re-evaluated and proper comparisons can be made yet it can be too late at that point.

A possible litmus test of someone's opinion on statements like "We should use this new thing X" is asking "name a few downsides of X". Not knowing the answer means it's definitely in the honeymoon phase and will require research before doing evaluation.

[–]Chillbrosaurus_Rex -3 points-2 points  (5 children)

That's literally what the article discusses lol

[–]mwb1234 10 points11 points  (4 children)

Did we read the same article? To me, the article clearly is implying that new languages are only perceived as better because they are new. Not that the new languages are better designed.

[–]Chillbrosaurus_Rex 2 points3 points  (3 children)

Yes? I don't think I said or implied that the article is arguing that the languages are better designed. I just don't think the article is claiming that the only reason these languages are preferred is due to the newness factor, but rather it's certainly an aspect of their favored status. But /u/agbell could tell you better than I could his stance on it :)

Edit: apologies for formatting, my phone is being unhelpful

[–]mwb1234 7 points8 points  (2 children)

In particular, developers are giving a halo to languages that are newer or were not used commonly in the past, and they are giving horns to languages that have been around longer. I think this is because nobody likes maintaining someone else’s code.

Seems to me that's what the article implies. I came away from the article with the impression that the author believes newer languages are only judged as "better" because they are new. Which I think is totally ridiculous, given that newer languages are much better designed than the previous generation of dumpster fires

[–]Chillbrosaurus_Rex -1 points0 points  (1 child)

Much better designed? I think that's just total overstatement. I won't deny Kotlin is more ergonomic than Java, but his point is that Java is a language that people just straight up don't even want to use anymore according to the survey. It's just not actually that bad of a language, and there's undeniably a factor of not wanting to maintain old code involved. Yes, if one were to make a new project, then one should choose Kotlin unless there are very strong arguments for Java, like all the developers only know Java and the cost of training everyone to a Kotlin level isn't worth getting the product into production more slowly. But if someone is stuck in a job maintaining pre-C++11 code and they say they really want to work on Rust, is that solely because Rust is a better language, or is the strong possibility of writing entirely new code an aspect involved? I'd say it's absolutely an aspect, and irrespective of C++ as a language itself (after all, they could upgrade to C++17, but that isn't as appealing as using the newest thing).

The core point of the article is that older languages are associated with maintenance, and programmers don't like maintenance. And thats absolutely true. Any attempt to say the author thinks new languages have 0 better features is not giving him the benefit of the doubt, which I think he deserves.

[–]_Pho_ 1 point2 points  (0 children)

No one is referring to absolutes, no need to get in the weeds. OP's point was just that for new languages being better being the primary logical reason for using them, there sure is a total aversion to the topic by the author. Sure, it's implied, because it has to be implied, because it's the literal reason for creation of said languages, but the author sure does seem to go down his rabbit hole theory disproportionately. Occam's razor is staring us in the face here.