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"No way to prevent this" say users of only language where this regularly happens

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Re: "No way to prevent this" say users of only language where this regularly happens

#191

Post by pdimitar »

pjc50 wrote: post #63
tialaramex wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a deliberate echo of the famous Onion headline about America's absolutely disgraceful pretence that it couldn't do anything about all the shootings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_to_Prevent_This,%27_... > If someone has a choice, a safer more modern language can accommodate less skilled practitioners. This is the usual mistake. It's not a "skill issue". Footguns are a design mistake, they're much more…

Rather like the school shooting issue, the C issue is bound up with people at the identity level; they insist on the danger because they cannot stand the possibility of the danger being taken away from them. Their ability to use guns or C safely must not be questioned. They percieve it as an insult to take that choice away from them. They are the safe C programmer that never ships a CVE. They know that they themselve…

Congratulations, you just landed in my very small number of favorite comments.

Re: "No way to prevent this" say users of only language where this regularly happens

#192

Post by devjab »

nottorp wrote: post #98
pdimitar wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why I said "almost anything". I am aware that f.ex. kernel development and embedded work is still firmly in the C domain. I am not evangelizing for Rust, Golang or anything in particular. I am evangelizing for periodically asking yourself "Am I still using the best tool for the job?" which most people never do.

Actually, maybe Rust would get more people interested if it didn't sound like a religion...

It’s a cult, but you don’t have to join the cult. I use Rust both privately and more and more frequently professionally and I don’t really notice the cult community outside of smiling at it once in a while when it blows up on HN.

We’re mostly adopting rust to replace our C, to protect us from ourselves. It’s just so much easier to hand off these sort of projects to developers who mainly work with things like Java or C#. Partly because of the memory “safety” but also because things like enums work the way they expect them to being sum types, and so on. It’s also very clear when something is intended not to be mutable. The borrow checker is probably the biggest struggle, where with C, everything is a struggle.

Rust still has a long way to come though, and maybe it’ll never get there. I do think we’ll see an uptake as performance increasingly matters due to cloud costs and ESG. Right now though, I’d argue that unless you know why you “want” to use Rust then maybe you shouldn’t.

Re: "No way to prevent this" say users of only language where this regularly happens

#193

Post by pdimitar »

nottorp wrote: post #190
pdimitar wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No mention of how it's better No embarrassing buffer overflow CVEs is a very good start. To me that's an actual selling point and I've migrated from almost all UNIX coreutils to Rust alternatives for that reason alone. > Am I supposed to use a tool just because of what it's made of, or because it solves a problem for me? No, as an adult you are supposed to not frame the discussion unfairly and ask the right questio…

The right questions according to who? Are your coreutils replacements 100% drop-in?

I don't need a 100% drop-in. Barely anyone does. I've observed at least 80% of all of the coreutils features are not used by 90% - 99% of programmers and sysadmins.

Ask people if they used all flags of `sort` and report back results as a test of my hypothesis.

> The right questions according to who?

This is tiring. I told you twice that I'd prefer you engaging in technical merits. You keep drawing attention to what is annoying you but you'll have to talk to your friends and family about that because I am not interested.

Bye.

Re: "No way to prevent this" say users of only language where this regularly happens

#194

Post by ThunderSizzle »

nailer wrote: post #182
Supermancho wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The oversimplification is part of the joke.

[flagged]

Well, I'm glad that you volunteered to go live in Soviet Russia or Fascist Germany, or a disarmed Native American tribe.

Disarming population leads to tyranny without consequences.

Re: "No way to prevent this" say users of only language where this regularly happens

#195

Post by pdimitar »

devjab wrote: post #192
nottorp wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, maybe Rust would get more people interested if it didn't sound like a religion...

It’s a cult, but you don’t have to join the cult. I use Rust both privately and more and more frequently professionally and I don’t really notice the cult community outside of smiling at it once in a while when it blows up on HN. We’re mostly adopting rust to replace our C, to protect us from ourselves. It’s just so much easier to hand off these sort of projects to developers who mainly work with things like Java or…

Mostly agreed with your comment though I still have to remark that every community has zealots and it's mystifying to me why are people so annoyed by Rust's. So it's hard to agree that "Rust is a cult".

As you said, it's a pragmatic but also kinda niche language. I don't reach for it unless I can't do the job with others, easier and quicker to work with languages.

Re: "No way to prevent this" say users of only language where this regularly happens

#196

Post by [deleted] »

nomilk wrote: post #22

More broadly: > "No way to prevent $THIS" say users of only language where $THIS regularly happens A weird psychological quirk I've noticed (of myself, and others) is we'll often exhibit a sort of 'programming language xenophobia', where we apathetically accept (or don't even notice) unpleasantries of our language of choice, yet be quite averse to the unpleasantries of other languages. Maybe it's due to sunk cost; ti…

[deleted]

Re: "No way to prevent this" say users of only language where this regularly happens

#197

Post by pdimitar »

flohofwoe wrote: post #184
pdimitar wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well you can make OCaml and Rust look like dynamic typing as well by omitting type signatures and squeezing the type inference engine as much as you can but I was under the impression that you have more asked about something that is very relaxed in terms of upfront requirements and be able to tighten it up later? That's why I claimed that no such language exists.

I was thinking more in terms of "language surface" but it didn't come across, C and Zig have a fairly small language surface (Zig a bit bigger than C), simple language primitives that can be combined quite freely and without much restrictions, but at the same time not carrying a lot of semantics the compiler could use to ensure safety (ignoring the "sloppiness" design warts of C though, like implicit type conversions…

I agree that your million dollar question is very good and relevant. Rust can definitely be improved -- async is sticking out as a sore thumb still and it requires a lot of ad-hoc knowledge that's not at all intuitive -- but I'd still venture to say it does pretty well in many areas.

Rust absolutely is not the end state of programming languages but I feel in many ways it's quite ahead than most of everything else. But yes, we still need something a tad better than it.

Re: "No way to prevent this" say users of only language where this regularly happens

#198

Post by FdbkHb »

pdimitar wrote: post #143
jalapenos wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one possibility. Have you considered the other, that you're the old-man-yells-at-cloud variety of narcissist? Hence why you choose to interpret things as everyone (except you) is defective. Everyone (except you) is laughable, completely lacking in self-awareness, refusing to adapt and be and do as they should (according to you of course). Because they're all lesser than you! That's why. You write Rust. So obv…

> Couldn't be reasons like inertia, or lacking the time, or not having the budget to change, or being too tired to learn, or any other such thing that'd let them be equal to you but just with differing priorities. This is already included in the "almost anything" expression and you are the 4th person deliberately (or accidentally?) not noticing it. There are valid cases for C/C++ both on technical merits and business…

> This is already included in the "almost anything" expression and you are the 4th person deliberately (or accidentally?) not noticing it.

I genuinely think that :

1/ this field is dominated by a disproportionate amount of people with autistic traits

2/ their ability to reason only functions in the narrowest sense and their grasp of language (takes everything in the most literal sense, thinks in extremes, prone to putting things in boxes, have a very, very strong attachment to their routine and are unable to ever leave the comfort zone they constructed) makes any attempt at communication beyond painful.

I have come to not even bother replying to people who are unable to understand human words such as when they interpret "most" as meaning "all" or "rarely" as "never" as it's one of the telltale signs that it is going to be extremely unproductive.

This phenomenon is the cause of most pains and drama. Once you start to see how this pattern develops you understand the true cause of the endless bikeshedding, of why even the idea of having a code of conduct can raise endless anger and storms and so on. You're touching a comfort zone so the temper tantrums are thrown. The routine has been built and it must continue until the end of times.

If there's any field in this world that is in need of more neurotypical, emotionally stable adults, this is it.

Re: "No way to prevent this" say users of only language where this regularly happens

#199

Post by tecleandor »

ThunderSizzle wrote: post #194
nailer wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Well, I'm glad that you volunteered to go live in Soviet Russia or Fascist Germany, or a disarmed Native American tribe. Disarming population leads to tyranny without consequences.

Or most of the EU countries as of today? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: "No way to prevent this" say users of only language where this regularly happens

#200

Post by flohofwoe »

anon-3988 wrote: post #146
pdimitar wrote: post #53

I've been doing programming for ~31 years in total and ~22 years professionally and at this point I have lost all hope that programmers at large will ever gain these mythic qualities called "self-reflection" and "introspection". Truth is, these people are simply afraid for their cozy jobs, that's all there is to it. Derivative states of mind like Stockholm Syndrome and Sunk Cost Fallacy are quite normal to appear in…

No, more people should be using memory managed languages like Java and Golang. Then educate and expose people to sum types and pattern matching. It is actually insane how people is still unconvinced about sum types. Imagine how insane it is to program without product types? That's exactly what it felt like.

Just call them "tagged union" or "variant" and suddenly "sum types" are not so rare anymore ;)

...same with "struct", "record" or "tuple" vs "product type". Nobody calls them that except functional programmers and mathematicians, both quite rare specimen in the wider programming world, but nevertheless they are ancient and widely known concepts even among us "peasant coders" ;)

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