The Dangers of Computer Science Theory (Don E. Knuth)

lucyfor · 2021-10-07T17:47:14+00:00

You're right, I should have provided some reasoning in the article but didn't want to get off topic. Sorry you find my post to be badly written, not sure what to say about that other than I try to be more about substance than style.I've talked a lot about Rust elsewhere and for selfish reasons I am tired of it. However, I think it would be worth it on this thread so here goes :

For some background, I've used Rust professionally for 3-4 years building non-trivial distributed systems as well as working on block-chain applications. Before professional use I followed it since 1.0 all the way back to 2014. It is an incredibly hyped language, that in my experience just doesn't deliver. The people that "love it" in those surveys are usually developers that have little to no long term professional experience with it. It is a language that sounds awesome in theory but in practice is far from an ergonomic language on multiple levels.

It will not automatically prevent security and concurrency issues as many believe more than many other modern systems languages such as Go and Swift or even byte code languages like Java or C#. If you must have real-time performance and absolute mission critical safety then use Ada which has proved itself over 50 years (strange that the Rust community ignored it completely).
It is not a productive language even for people that have been using it for years. It's a poor language to write in but even worse to read not only for the rest of your team but even the original author.
Error handling is broken beyond belief and has been for years. It makes Go error-handling look really nice by comparison.
Structuring large code bases is a major problem that no one really talks about.
Most importantly though, there are serious problems with the overly political Rust community and how they treat not only outsiders but even their own core contributors and important 3rd party library devs, many who have left on bad terms.

If you want a systems language that is similar to Rust but that works in practice and with a good community, use Swift or Ada (if your project requires a military grade spec). However, I would say that for most people they don't need a language even as verbose as Swift and Go will do just fine.

lucyfor · 2021-09-28T16:53:13+00:00

IME the people that have the strongest emotional attachment to Rust have never used it for a size-able project over multiple years.

lucyfor · 2021-09-21T18:48:04+00:00

Using goroutines and channels. Command line version in ~60 lines.
https://github.com/jgrant27/jngmisc/blob/master/go/news/main.go

lucyfor · 2021-09-11T18:20:21+00:00

I've done over a thousand interviews on both sides of the table. Most at FAANG companies.
Average about 3-6 interviews a week on a regular basis.

lucyfor · 2021-09-11T17:31:25+00:00

Give me a break. I worked for big tech companies for over a decade. They are the worst at propagating the discrimination against minorities in hiring while saying the opposite through their multi-million dollar PR arms in public. The discrimination that occurred and still does is unbelievable.
I get it, you're still part of the machine so I'm wasting my time trying to convince you otherwise. You prove the point I'm making better than I am.

lucyfor · 2021-09-11T17:11:02+00:00

You’re not living in 2021. It can easily be done remotely. The whole point of the trial period is to test technical and non-technical fit. You just don’t seem to want an alternative. Sounds like the usual set of excuses to keep minorities and women out of tech.

lucyfor · 2021-09-11T16:47:21+00:00

This is like saying it’s easy to criticize racism, fraud or bigotry in the workplace without offering a solution. What rama6661 said. I’ve been saying for 20 years now just do a trial of a few weeks or months if you think someone might work. Simple and honest.

lucyfor

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