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APT Rust requirement raises questions

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Re: APT Rust requirement raises questions

#141

Post by powerclue »

tcfhgj wrote: post #32
chillfox wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

actually a vegan has to preach to some degree, otherwise it would be like a human rights advocate looking away when humans are tortured

As a vegetarian on ethical grounds (mostly due to factory farming of meat) I politely disagree with your assessment.

I have to decline and explain in social settings all the time, because I will not eat meat served to me. But I do not need to preach when I observe others eating meat. I, like all humans, have a finite amount of time and energy. I'd rather spend that time focused on where I think it will do the greatest good. And that's rarely explaining why factory farming of meat is truly evil.

The best time is when someone asks, "why don't you eat meat?" Then you can have a conversation. Otherwise I've found it best to just quietly and politely decline, as more often than not one can be accommodated easily. (Very occasionally, though, someone feels it necessary to try and score imaginary points on you because they have some axe to grind against vegetarians and vegans. I've found it best to let them burn themselves out and move on. Life's too short to worry about them.)

Re: APT Rust requirement raises questions

#143

Post by mrweasel »

movpasd wrote: post #84
dv35z wrote: post #31

Every time I consider learning Rust, I am thrown back by how... "janky" the syntax is. It seems to me that we ought to have a system-level language which builds upon the learnings of the past 20+ years. Can someone help me understand this? Why are we pushing forward with a language that has a Perl-esque unreadability...? Comparison: I often program in Python (and teach it) - and while it has its own syntax warts & fr…

You might this blog post interesting, which argues that it's Rust semantics and not syntax that results in the noisiness, i.e.: it's intrinsic complexity: https://matklad.github.io/2023/01/26/rusts-ugly-syntax.html I found it reasonably convincing. For what it's worth, I found Rust's syntax quite daunting at first (coming from Python as well), but it only took a few months of continuous use to get used to it. I think…

That article is really good, because it highlight that Rust doesn't have to look messy. Part of the problem, I think, is that there's a few to many people who think that messy version is better, because it "uses more of the language" and it makes them look smarter. Or maybe Rust just makes it to hard to see through the semantics and realize that just because feature is there doesn't mean that you need it.

There's also a massive difference between the type of C or Perl someone like me would write, versus someone trying to cope with a more hostile environment or who requires higher levels of performance. My code might be easier to read, but it technically has issue, they are mostly not relevant, while the reverse is true for a more skilled developer, in a different environment. Rust seems to attract really skilled people, who have really defensive code styles or who use more of the provided language features, and that makes to code harder to read, but that would also be the case in e.g. C++.

Re: APT Rust requirement raises questions

#144

Post by yoyohello13 »

thousand_nights wrote: post #86
tcfhgj wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what makes it unreadable for you?

nta you're replying to, but as someone who doesn't know rust, on first glance it seems like it's littered with too many special symbols and very verbose. as i understand it this is required because of the very granular low level control rust offers maybe unreadable is too strong of a word, but there is a valid point of it looking unapproachable to someone new

People often misuse unreadable when they mean unfamiliar. Rust really isn't that difficult to read when you get used to it.

Re: APT Rust requirement raises questions

#145

Post by [deleted] »

dv35z wrote: post #31

Every time I consider learning Rust, I am thrown back by how... "janky" the syntax is. It seems to me that we ought to have a system-level language which builds upon the learnings of the past 20+ years. Can someone help me understand this? Why are we pushing forward with a language that has a Perl-esque unreadability...? Comparison: I often program in Python (and teach it) - and while it has its own syntax warts & fr…

[deleted]

Re: APT Rust requirement raises questions

#146

Post by bicarbonato »

dv35z wrote: post #31

Every time I consider learning Rust, I am thrown back by how... "janky" the syntax is. It seems to me that we ought to have a system-level language which builds upon the learnings of the past 20+ years. Can someone help me understand this? Why are we pushing forward with a language that has a Perl-esque unreadability...? Comparison: I often program in Python (and teach it) - and while it has its own syntax warts & fr…

What do people actually mean when they say "the syntax is janky"?

I often see comparisons to languages like Python and Kotlin, but both encode far less information on their syntax because they don't have the same features as Rust, so there's no way for them to express the same semantics as rust.

Sure, you can make Rust look simpler by removing information, but at that point you're not just changing syntax, you're changing the language's semantics.

Is there any language that preserves the same level of type information while using a less "janky" syntax?

Re: APT Rust requirement raises questions

#147

Post by SquibblesRedux »

dv35z wrote: post #31

Every time I consider learning Rust, I am thrown back by how... "janky" the syntax is. It seems to me that we ought to have a system-level language which builds upon the learnings of the past 20+ years. Can someone help me understand this? Why are we pushing forward with a language that has a Perl-esque unreadability...? Comparison: I often program in Python (and teach it) - and while it has its own syntax warts & fr…

As an official greybeard who has written much in C, C++, Perl, Python, and now Rust, I can say Rust is a wonderful systems programming language. Nothing at all like Perl, and as others have mentioned, a great relief from C++ while providing all the power and low-level bits and bobs important for systems programming.

Re: APT Rust requirement raises questions

#148

Post by hedora »

dv35z wrote: post #31

Every time I consider learning Rust, I am thrown back by how... "janky" the syntax is. It seems to me that we ought to have a system-level language which builds upon the learnings of the past 20+ years. Can someone help me understand this? Why are we pushing forward with a language that has a Perl-esque unreadability...? Comparison: I often program in Python (and teach it) - and while it has its own syntax warts & fr…

The sigils in Rust (and perl) are there to aid readability. After you use it a bit, you get used to ignoring them unless they look weird.

All the python programs I've had to maintain (I never choose python) have had major maintainability problems due to python's clean looking syntax. I can still look at crazy object oriented perl meta-programming stuff I wrote 20 years ago, and figure out what it's doing.

Golang takes another approach: They impoverished the language until it didn't need fancy syntax to be unambiguously readable. As a workaround, they heavily rely on codegen, so (for instance) Kubernetes is around 2 million lines of code. The lines are mostly readable (even the machine generated ones), but no human is going to be able to read them at the rate they churn.

Anyway, pick your poison, I guess, but there's a reason Rust attracts experienced systems programmers.

Re: APT Rust requirement raises questions

#149

Post by WD-42 »

simonw wrote: post #71
simonask wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you talking about? Rust’s function signature and type declaration syntaxes are extremely vanilla, unless you venture into some really extreme use cases with lots of lifetime annotations and generic bounds. I seriously don’t get it. fn add(a: i32, b: i32) -> i32 { … } Where’s the “Perl-esqueness”?

trait Handler { fn handle (&self, input: &'a str) -> Result ; } fn process_handler ( handler: Box , input: &'a str, ) -> Result { handler.handle(input) }

Lifetimes really only come into play if you are doing something really obscure. Often times when I’m about to add lifetimes to my code I re-think it and realize there is a better way to architect it that doesn’t involve them at all. They are a warning sign.

Re: APT Rust requirement raises questions

#150

Post by carlmr »

echelon wrote: post #128
movpasd wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might this blog post interesting, which argues that it's Rust semantics and not syntax that results in the noisiness, i.e.: it's intrinsic complexity: https://matklad.github.io/2023/01/26/rusts-ugly-syntax.html I found it reasonably convincing. For what it's worth, I found Rust's syntax quite daunting at first (coming from Python as well), but it only took a few months of continuous use to get used to it. I think…

That's it exactly. Once you're writing Rust at full speed, you'll find you won't be putting lifetimes and trait bounds on everything. Some of this becomes implicit, some of it you can just avoid with simpler patterns. When you write Rust code without lifetimes and trait bounds and nested types, the language looks like Ruby lite. When you write Rust code with traits or nested types, it looks like Java + Ruby. When you…

>When you write Rust code without lifetimes and trait bounds and nested types, the language looks like Ruby lite.

And once you learn a few idioms this is mostly the default.

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