Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Rust's language ergonomics initiative

blog.rust-lang.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 295 posts

Re: Rust's language ergonomics initiative

#41

Post by zzzcpan »

modeless wrote: post #15

Are there plans to do user studies? 10 minutes watching new users code in Rust will give you better ideas than 10 weeks thinking about the problem in your head. I feel like there's a real lack of user testing in software development tools land. If you're developing software for unsophisticated users it's obvious that you should be doing user testing, but it's an often ignored fact that developers are users too! APIs,…

"If you're developing software for unsophisticated users it's obvious that you should be doing user testing"

Compilers actually have a unique opportunity to introduce some form of opt-out tracking of all of the compilation errors with sources, etc. This could really help to understand the users.

Re: Rust's language ergonomics initiative

#42

Post by johncolanduoni »

antiquark wrote: post #25

They should take on a huge project, like say, converting the linux source code into Rust. The sheer bulk of the code will effectively "force" them to make Rust ergonomic. They might even end up with annoying things, like different sized ints on different CPUs, or... (horror of horrors)... running Rust through a pre-processor as part of its compilation.

Well both of those things basically already exist; you can do conditional compilation based on architecture, etc. and macros can do some of the less hacky things a preprocesser can (as well as many things it can't).

The biggest Rust project (which already has many of the core contributors working on it) is Servo, and it's probably about as ambitious as you can get while still having a nonzero chance at completion. I don't think there's much additional value in taking on a completely unfinishable project to shape the Rust language so it's good for a kind of programming (i.e. Kernel programming) that is far removed from what 99% of potential users will use it for.

Re: Rust's language ergonomics initiative

#43

Post by steveklabnik »

zzzcpan wrote: post #41
modeless wrote: post #15

Are there plans to do user studies? 10 minutes watching new users code in Rust will give you better ideas than 10 weeks thinking about the problem in your head. I feel like there's a real lack of user testing in software development tools land. If you're developing software for unsophisticated users it's obvious that you should be doing user testing, but it's an often ignored fact that developers are users too! APIs,…

"If you're developing software for unsophisticated users it's obvious that you should be doing user testing" Compilers actually have a unique opportunity to introduce some form of opt-out tracking of all of the compilation errors with sources, etc. This could really help to understand the users.

We have discussed doing this in the past, actually. Opt-in (oops, had "out" here initially) is very important here!

I am not sure if it's something that ever landed or not...

Re: Rust's language ergonomics initiative

#44

Post by glangdale »

modeless wrote: post #15

Are there plans to do user studies? 10 minutes watching new users code in Rust will give you better ideas than 10 weeks thinking about the problem in your head. I feel like there's a real lack of user testing in software development tools land. If you're developing software for unsophisticated users it's obvious that you should be doing user testing, but it's an often ignored fact that developers are users too! APIs,…

This would be really great. I constantly see excuses for why no-one should bother doing user studies of programming languages because its really hard. So let's not do it at all and instead focus on approach #2 that you lay out ("10 weeks thinking about the problem in your head").

That being said, this is really hard. Observing a (necessarily small) sample of heterogeneous programmers dealing with (necessarily small) tasks isn't easy, either.

I wonder whether users would consent to having their text editors and compilers instrumented to produce a user study of every single character typed and every single build (failed or successful, especially failed). I would imagine that a language designer could learn a huge amount from seeing all the things their compiler is rejecting from real users...

Re: Rust's language ergonomics initiative

#45

Post by no_protocol »

tedmielczarek wrote: post #40
no_protocol wrote: post #11

I am not sure if this directly applies to your post, but it came to mind when I read the section about `extern crate`. It seems like the Cargo system is relied upon by almost all Rust users, and I am not sure if the following is an ergonomics problem or a lack of understanding on my part. A couple months ago I was exploring Rust's web server capabilities after seeing the "Are we web yet?" page. I decided to try out t…

> I am not sure if this directly applies to your post, but it came to mind when I read the section about `extern crate`. It seems like the Cargo system is relied upon by almost all Rust users, and I am not sure if this is an ergonomics problem or a lack of understanding on my part. This is definitely true, and I don't think it's negative. You can use Rust without Cargo and crates.io, but it feels very different. It's…

Oops, I used `this` when I should have said `the following.` I have updated the line in my post above.

I wasn't suggesting Cargo being relied upon by everyone was an ergonomics issue, but instead referring to the description in the remainder of my post.

Re: Rust's language ergonomics initiative

#46

Post by glangdale »

steveklabnik wrote: post #43
zzzcpan wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If you're developing software for unsophisticated users it's obvious that you should be doing user testing" Compilers actually have a unique opportunity to introduce some form of opt-out tracking of all of the compilation errors with sources, etc. This could really help to understand the users.

We have discussed doing this in the past, actually. Opt-in (oops, had "out" here initially) is very important here! I am not sure if it's something that ever landed or not...

My comment crossed with the GP post here, but that's a really good idea. Please look into it!

Re: Rust's language ergonomics initiative

#48

Post by CalChris »

steveklabnik wrote: post #33
CalChris wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#define M_PI 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288

I don't understand what this means. You'd use const in Rust for this, not a macro.

That was just a trivial example. Yes, you could use a const which would be difficult to share across files. Moreover, if you wanted to do something equally textual

  #define PASS_VERBOSE if (flag_verbose && first_pass) printf
you just might be able to but only with a completely different tool.

A macro processor is not of the language; it is above the language.

Re: Rust's language ergonomics initiative

#49

Post by nostrademons »

tatterdemalion wrote: post #23
modeless wrote: post #15

Are there plans to do user studies? 10 minutes watching new users code in Rust will give you better ideas than 10 weeks thinking about the problem in your head. I feel like there's a real lack of user testing in software development tools land. If you're developing software for unsophisticated users it's obvious that you should be doing user testing, but it's an often ignored fact that developers are users too! APIs,…

When we're trying to balance a trade off, I often wish we could just do A/B testing on it, but that's not realistic for languages.

What you can do is run over a large corpus of programs (crates.io? GitHub?) to identify the places where the different alternatives would impact code, collect metrics on them, and pull some sample programs to investigate the impact on them of the different alternatives. Is anything like that being done?

The HTML5 spec was developed in this way, and some of the code-health folks at Google were just starting to operate this way when I left, but I haven't heard of many other language-design efforts working like this. The technology & data exists now, with large public corpora of open-source code, parsing libraries that can identify patterns in it, and big-data tools to run these compiler tools over a large corpus. It's a bit of a paradigm shift from how languages are typically developed, though.

Re: Rust's language ergonomics initiative

#50

Post by staticassertion »

alfiedotwtf wrote: post #29

From moving from Perl to Rust, the only thing that I miss is the postfix "if": return true if number > 2; VS: if number > 2 { return true } I find that one-liners like these are really ergonomic.

That would this in rust: if number { true } else { false }

If it's the last expression it will implicitly return the values. Easily fits on one line.

Post reply on HN