I can't help but feel that given the requirements laid out in the article Nim would be a more suitable fit for their goals over Rust. I do think Nim really nails great performance with a very clean and straightforward syntax, certainly easier for someone who only works in Python to pick up over Rust.
Why scientists are turning to Rust
21–30 of 105 posts
Re: Why scientists are turning to Rust
#22This seems like a stretch, or it seems very limited to the specific people mentioned in the article. I find it hard to believe that scientists who have specialised very narrowly in their domain will also want to be full-time software engineers too and choose one of the most complex languages on top of that. This just doesn't scale beyond the few people who are really into it. > Köster, now at the University of Duisbu…
I agree, a memory managed language will always beat the borrow checker in expressiveness, ergonomics, simplicity, maintainability. Unless you're writing system-level or low-latency apps I don't see the benefit to Rust. If you need better-than-python performance there are many good memory-managed LLVM or JVM/.Net options available.
Re: Why scientists are turning to Rust
#23This seems like a stretch, or it seems very limited to the specific people mentioned in the article. I find it hard to believe that scientists who have specialised very narrowly in their domain will also want to be full-time software engineers too and choose one of the most complex languages on top of that. This just doesn't scale beyond the few people who are really into it. > Köster, now at the University of Duisbu…
>I find it hard to believe that scientists who have specialized very narrowly in their domain will also want to be full-time software engineers too and choose one of the most complex languages on top of that.
I think it's really field-dependent. I know academics/profs in the computational biology space that accumulate a looot of software over time from their colleagues/students. Also, it's not the scientists/PIs writing the software :P
Re: Why scientists are turning to Rust
#24You know why I like Rust as a programmer? It's community feels a lot like how the Perl community did at the height of Perl's popularity. This is in contrast to Python's (has a friendly community, but tends to have bikeshedding), Node's (outright toxic npm-based warfare), or Java's (corporations shit out awful code when they're done with it, ie, everything donated to Eclipse or Apache, or all the dumpster fire code Go…
Maybe Rust is the true Perl 6 :O
Re: Why scientists are turning to Rust
#25Scientist are not turning to rust. Scientist, if they are turning, are turning to the scientific standard compute language and its plethora of platforms and libraries: Python. Rust is fine, but it will never catch up or replace Python. Python is just good enough at what it does and will only become better.
> Python is just good enough at what it does
Perhaps?
> and will only become better.
Very unlikely
Re: Why scientists are turning to Rust
#26I work in an academic computer science/big data/ML research environment. Nobody is using Rust. They use Python or Java.
The computationalists I know are maintain large sets of fortran code. When they’re not doing that, they’re porting fortran codes to julia or python or writing new codes in julia or python.
Re: Why scientists are turning to Rust
#27This seems like a stretch, or it seems very limited to the specific people mentioned in the article. I find it hard to believe that scientists who have specialised very narrowly in their domain will also want to be full-time software engineers too and choose one of the most complex languages on top of that. This just doesn't scale beyond the few people who are really into it. > Köster, now at the University of Duisbu…
Scientists didn't have a problem writing Fortran, back in its day. I doubt they'd have a problem with Rust or even C++ if they needed to.
Re: Why scientists are turning to Rust
#28I can't help but feel that given the requirements laid out in the article Nim would be a more suitable fit for their goals over Rust. I do think Nim really nails great performance with a very clean and straightforward syntax, certainly easier for someone who only works in Python to pick up over Rust.
Nim would be a nice option if the ecosystem were even half as developed as the Rust package ecosystem.
Re: Why scientists are turning to Rust
#29This seems like a stretch, or it seems very limited to the specific people mentioned in the article. I find it hard to believe that scientists who have specialised very narrowly in their domain will also want to be full-time software engineers too and choose one of the most complex languages on top of that. This just doesn't scale beyond the few people who are really into it. > Köster, now at the University of Duisbu…
It may help to remember that the previous go-to language for scientists was Fortran. Of course, not all scientists, but a very much alive subset that still use it today.
I'm a data scientist and I know Rust. Though, to be fair, I'm probably not the type the article is describing.
Re: Why scientists are turning to Rust
#30I don't think scientists should worry themselves with the cognitive burden of Rust.
It's hard enough to figure out how to do things in any language as a full-time software developer, never mind someone that just needs a program for their research, etc.