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APT Rust requirement raises questions

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Re: APT Rust requirement raises questions

#181

Post by aallaall »

steveklabnik wrote: post #41
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…

Syntax tends to be deeply personal. I would say the most straightforward answer to your question is "many people disagree that it is unreadable." Rust did build on the learnings of the past 20 years. Essentially all of its syntax was taken from other languages, even lifetimes.

There’s syntax that is objectively easier to both read and write, and there’s syntax that is both harder to read and write. For a majority.

In general, using english words consisting of a-z is easier to read. Using regex-like mojibake is harder.

For an concrete example in rust, using pipes in lambdas, instead of an arrow, is aweful.

Re: APT Rust requirement raises questions

#183

Post by jandrese »

tcfhgj wrote: post #113
enriquto wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am thrown back by how... "janky" the syntax is. Well if you come from C++ it's a breath of fresh air! Rust is like a "cleaned-up" C++, that does not carry the historical baggage forced by backwards compatibility. It is well-thought out from the start. The syntax may appear a bit too synthetic; but that's just the first day of use. If you use it for a few days, you'll soon find that it's a great, beautiful languag…

I am coming from C++ and think Cargo is a blessing. I like that I can just add a dependency and be done instead of having to deal with dependencies which require downloading stuff from the internet and making them discoverable for the project specific tool chain - which works differently on every operating system. Same goes for compiling other projects.

While it kinda flies under the radar, most modern C projects do have a kind of package management solution in the form of pkg-config. Instead of the wild west of downloading and installing every dependency and figuring out how to integrate it properly with the OS and your project you can add a bit of syntactic sugar to your Makefile and have that mostly handled for you, save for the part where you will need to use your platform's native package manager to install the dependencies first. On a modern system using a package on a C project just requires a Makefile that looks something like this:

    CC=clang
    MODULES=glib-2.0 atk
    CFLAGS=-g -Wall -pedantic --std=c17 `pkg-config --cflags $(MODULES)`
    LDLIBS=`pkg-config --libs $(MODULES)`

    ALL: myapp

    myapp: myapp.c utils.c io.c

Re: APT Rust requirement raises questions

#185

Post by jandrese »

juliangmp wrote: post #159
kataklasm wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that is the kind of convenience and ease of use that brings us another npm malware incident every other month at this point.

This is a real problem but I wouldn't blame the existence of good tooling on it. Sure you don't have this issue with C or C++, but thats because adding even a single dependency to a C or C++ project sucks, the tooling sucks. I wholly blame developers who are too eager to just pull new dependencies in when they could've just written 7 lines themselves.

I remember hearing a few years ago about how developers considered every line of code the wrote as a failing and talked about how modern development was just gluing otherwise maintained modules together to avoid having to maintain their own project. I thought this sounded insane and I still do.

Re: APT Rust requirement raises questions

#186

Post by steveklabnik »

xscott wrote: post #165
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…

I'm not sure which of the dozen Rust-syntax supporters I should reply to, but consider something like these three (probably equivalent) syntaxes: let mut a = Vec:: ::new(); let mut b = >::new(); let mut c = >::new(); let mut d: Vec = Vec::new(); Which one will your coworker choose? What will your other corworkers choose? This is day one stuff for declaring a dynamic array. What you really want is something like: let…

I mean, the fact that you mention "probably equivalent" is part of the reality here: Nobody writes the majority of these forms in real code. They are equivalent, by the way.

In real code, the only form I've ever seen out of these in the wild is your d form.

Re: APT Rust requirement raises questions

#187

Post by everybodyknows »

stingraycharles wrote: post #52
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…

Seems like a fairly decent syntax. It’s less simple than many systems languages because it has a very strong type system. That’s a choice of preference in how you want to solve a problem. I don’t think the memory safety guarantees of Rust could be expressed in the syntax of a language like C or Go.

I code mostly in Go and the typing sloppiness is a major pain point.

Example: You read the expression "x.f", say, in the output of git-diff. Is x a struct object, or a pointer to a struct? Only by referring to enclosing context can you know for sure.

Re: APT Rust requirement raises questions

#188

Post by tcfhgj »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #70
tcfhgj wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's a bit of a jump. Veganism is a personal lifestyle / dietary choice. Objecting to livestock is activism. You can do either without the other.

it's not just a dietary choice and it's a personal lifestyle in the sense of it being your choice, but not in the sense of a lifestyle which is limited to your private space.

You think it's wrong abusing animals. Why would you relate that only to you and think it would be ok for others to abuse them? You wouldn't

Re: APT Rust requirement raises questions

#189

Post by steveklabnik »

aallaall wrote: post #181
steveklabnik wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Syntax tends to be deeply personal. I would say the most straightforward answer to your question is "many people disagree that it is unreadable." Rust did build on the learnings of the past 20 years. Essentially all of its syntax was taken from other languages, even lifetimes.

There’s syntax that is objectively easier to both read and write, and there’s syntax that is both harder to read and write. For a majority. In general, using english words consisting of a-z is easier to read. Using regex-like mojibake is harder. For an concrete example in rust, using pipes in lambdas, instead of an arrow, is aweful.

Rust's pipes in lambdas come from Ruby, a language that's often regarded as having beautiful syntax.

Rust is objectively not mojibake. The equivalent here would be like using a-z, as Rust's syntax is borrowed from other languages in wide use, not anything particularly esoteric. (Unless you could OCaml as esoteric, which I do believe is somewhat arguable but that's only one thing, the argument still holds for the vast majority of the language.)

Re: APT Rust requirement raises questions

#190

Post by SoftTalker »

pxc wrote: post #138
short_sells_poo wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm writing this as a heavy python user in my day job. Python is terrible for writing complex systems in. Both the language and the libraries are full of footguns for the novice and expert alike. It has 20 years of baggage, the packaging and environment handling is nothing short of an unmitigated disaster, although uv seems to be a minor light at the end of the tunnel. It is not a simple language at this point. It ha…

What's wrong with R? I used it and liked it in undergrad. I certainly didn't use it as seriously as the users who made Python popular, but to this day I remember R fondly and would never choose Python for a personal project. My R use was self-taught, as well. I refused to use proprietary software for school all through high school and university, so I used R where we were expected to use Excel or MatLab (though I usu…

R is the most haphazard programming environment I've ever used. It feels like an agglomeration of hundreds of different people's shell aliases and scripting one-liners.

I'll grant my only exposure has been a two- or three-day "Intro to R" class but I ran screaming from that experience and have never touched it again.

It maybe worked against me that I am a programmer, not a statistician or researcher.

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