Why Rust is a great choice for startups • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#291

Post by taylodl » Thu, Jun 16, 2022, 3:58 PM UTC

JoelMcCracken wrote: post #286

akhmatova wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just need to know what you're doing The problem is that there just aren't that many people who choose to invest in learning Haskell -- or for that matter, the essential-to-master nooks and crannies of Rust. And the learning curve to get there is intrinsically steeper that for, well, all those "dum-dum" ducktyped and/or mostly procedural languages one imagines you don't particular care much for, now do you. Of cou…

> now do you Depends. I like JS ok. I really like Lisps. I miss doing Ruby sometimes. I've been doing more Python lately and find it rather distasteful, all this tooling is just so so complicated for very dubious guarantees/benefit. Not all of us are a sum of tropes. The main thing that I find frustrating is that the actual act of programming in an impure language is so much harder . Haskell is def harder to learn, l…

You remind me that it's not the language that people use per se, it's the frameworks. Python has been around for 30 years. It was NumPy and SciPy that propelled it to the phenomenon we know today. Likewise with Ruby. I remember when Ruby was released in the mid 90's and wondering why would anyone use this language? Ten years later the Rails framework appeared and suddenly Ruby was a language that went mainstream.

Honest question - does Haskell have such a compelling framework driving its adoption? Or does Haskell suffer the "curse of Lisp" and people just create whatever they need when they need it and no big framework ever gets developed that drives adoption?

Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#292

Post by akhmatova » Thu, Jun 16, 2022, 6:53 PM UTC

taylodl wrote: post #291

JoelMcCracken wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> now do you Depends. I like JS ok. I really like Lisps. I miss doing Ruby sometimes. I've been doing more Python lately and find it rather distasteful, all this tooling is just so so complicated for very dubious guarantees/benefit. Not all of us are a sum of tropes. The main thing that I find frustrating is that the actual act of programming in an impure language is so much harder . Haskell is def harder to learn, l…

You remind me that it's not the language that people use per se , it's the frameworks. Python has been around for 30 years. It was NumPy and SciPy that propelled it to the phenomenon we know today. Likewise with Ruby. I remember when Ruby was released in the mid 90's and wondering why would anyone use this language? Ten years later the Rails framework appeared and suddenly Ruby was a language that went mainstream. Ho…

But then it actually does get back to the language because the reason people build NumPy and SciPy (and Django and tons of stuff in other domains) is that Python is, after all (despite its warts) so damn easy to use. Making it easier to build all that stuff, and more rewarding also (because there's an audience).

Which is not an extra but in fact means a heck of a lot for a language's chance at long-term acceptance.

Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#293

Post by JoelMcCracken » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 6:39 AM UTC

taylodl wrote: post #291

JoelMcCracken wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> now do you Depends. I like JS ok. I really like Lisps. I miss doing Ruby sometimes. I've been doing more Python lately and find it rather distasteful, all this tooling is just so so complicated for very dubious guarantees/benefit. Not all of us are a sum of tropes. The main thing that I find frustrating is that the actual act of programming in an impure language is so much harder . Haskell is def harder to learn, l…

You remind me that it's not the language that people use per se , it's the frameworks. Python has been around for 30 years. It was NumPy and SciPy that propelled it to the phenomenon we know today. Likewise with Ruby. I remember when Ruby was released in the mid 90's and wondering why would anyone use this language? Ten years later the Rails framework appeared and suddenly Ruby was a language that went mainstream. Ho…

> compelling framework

Sadly no. There are contenders for this that have arisen over the years, but we don’t have a RoR for Haskell yet.

If you’re curious, here is a talk that goes into this problem. It’s very accessible IMO. https://youtu.be/fNpsgTIpODA

To be honest, the compelling reason to learn Haskell for me was so I could engage with various academic literature. I just kept running into things I didn’t understand which were tangential to the topic of the paper, and it seemed like the most straightforward way to solve this was to start with learning Haskell. Once I learned it, I realized I was wrong in my biases, and Haskell is a fantastic tool for normal programming, with some important caveats.

Re: Why Rust is a great choice for startups

#294

Post by JoelMcCracken » Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 6:41 AM UTC

akhmatova wrote: post #292

taylodl wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You remind me that it's not the language that people use per se , it's the frameworks. Python has been around for 30 years. It was NumPy and SciPy that propelled it to the phenomenon we know today. Likewise with Ruby. I remember when Ruby was released in the mid 90's and wondering why would anyone use this language? Ten years later the Rails framework appeared and suddenly Ruby was a language that went mainstream. Ho…

But then it actually does get back to the language because the reason people build NumPy and SciPy (and Django and tons of stuff in other domains) is that Python is, after all (despite its warts) so damn easy to use . Making it easier to build all that stuff, and more rewarding also (because there's an audience). Which is not an extra but in fact means a heck of a lot for a language's chance at long-term acceptance.

Yep, this is absolutely a problem. Beginner-friendliness is huge, and we need to keep working on it.