581–590 of 869 posts
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> Rust? It's much more painful to use than C++. Unless you're doing something really highly specific to C++ (like Cuda for instance or deep integration with big C++ codebase), saying that rust is painful compared to C++ is laughable.
Gonna have to unwrap() this take
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As someone who has been writing C++ at Google, this exactly. Despite all the tooling, guidelines and "internal magic", C++ is still an abomination. And no it has nothing to do with memory management, I actually do like C. I love how Eric Raymond describes it as "anti-compact", because, well, it really is. C++ as a whole should be deprecated -- and no new projects should use C++ (unless for some very odd and specific…
>C++ as a whole should be deprecated -- and no new projects should use C++ (unless for some very odd and specific reason). And what can be used instead of C++? C? If C was better, then C++ wouldn't have been invented. Rust? It's much more painful to use than C++. Zig? It's immature and has very low usage. Nim? Has very low user base. Julia? It isn't solving the same problems.
When cfront turned up, the first versions basically automated that suckage. C++ did get better, but it was still horrible compared to CLOS or Smalltalk. This was largely due to weirdness in how the constructor/destructor ordering worked, the giant bogosity that is multiple inheritance and a few massive other undefined behaviours that every compiler did differently, but I think at this point it's fair to point out the language is bad and things like C# are so much better it's not even funny any more.
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As someone who's not an EE (with no degree in anything at all) and has made many circuit boards... No, they're not that complicated. Not really. I've even designed an analog hall effect keyboard PCB with integrated IR sensor, dual power regulators (to handle 95 ultra bright RGB LEDs), invented-by-me analog hall effect rotary encoders (incremental and absolute), and more. It wasn't rocket science.
> I've even designed an analog hall effect keyboard PCB with integrated IR sensor, dual power regulators (to handle 95 ultra bright RGB LEDs), invented-by-me analog hall effect rotary encoders (incremental and absolute), and more. It wasn't rocket science. Sorry to burst your bubble... Glad you learned enough to do it and had fun with it. Yet, such PCB's are trivial to design. Heck, one could auto-route something lik…
I sometimes run little 30 minute programming workshops where I teach people enough of the basics that they can walk away with something they’ve made. Give a novice 3 months to go through an bootcamp and they can become a half useful programmer.
But the “other half” of their knowledge will take a lifetime to learn. In just the last 2 weeks my job has involved: crypto algorithms, security threat modelling, distributed systems design, network protocols, binary serialisation, Async vs sync design choices, algorithmic optimization and CRDTs.
It’s easy enough to be a “good enough” programmer with a few months of study. But it takes a lifetime of work if you want to be an all terrain developer.
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If people think C++ is hard to learn and attracts opinionated people boy are they in for a surprise when they start using Rust.
Learning rust is like cycling over 2 big hills. It’s exhausting and painful if you’re in any way out of shape. Learning C++ is like cycling from SF to LA. It starts easy enough and every day you’re making a lot of satisfying progress. But you have so far to go because of all the features and quirks of the language. It’s probably easier to get started learning C++. But it’s also much faster to finish learning rust and…
I’m still not comfortable with Pin, UnsafeCell, raw FFI (lifetime and ownership handling across the boundary is tricky), and complex macros. But I also think that you don’t need to understand these at all to be an effective Rust dev.
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A lot of CRUD app development feels like tedious, repetitive busy work. Data entry was a solved problem in COBOL if not earlier, it's not gotten any harder in the decades since, it's just gotten more tedious. There are generic data entry tools that solve the entire class of problems in that space. In web tooling there are things like Django's Admin app. In "the ancient world" there is Excel for good and bad and ugly.…
The same can be said for dentists or architects or chemical engineers or whatever. Teeth and houses and oil refineries are “solved” problems in that we know how to do it. But each instance is a little different. Each customer wants their flavour of the problem solved. Long story short: don’t get into a line of work if you don’t like churning out multiples of the same thing for years.
- Dentists have dental hygienists that do the day-to-day grunt work so that dentists can focus on the real problems/exceptional cases (cavities, root canals, etc).
- Architects build the plans, but they leave it to construction workers to actually construct the project.
- Chemical engineers generally work with staffs of chemists and other roles that the take the engineered solution and apply it day-to-day.
Right now, software uses the same job titles "for everything". There's (perhaps intentionally) no differentiation between the people expected to solve the hard problems/engineer the tough solutions and the people hired to plug-and-chug their way through their 15th yet-another-CRUD-app that year. There are complaints in the surrounding threads even that some of the "drone work" pays better salaries and has better hours/corporate cultures than the harder stuff. It's an interesting "upside down" situation compared to even just the three fields specifically referenced here.
I went to an engineering school with the expectation that I would be doing software engineering not just in name but in role, but most of the jobs I've ever worked were paying me to do not that. I certainly know friends who are chemical engineers that also perform the role of chemists for their companies, but those are clearly distinct enough job descriptions with a big enough salary distance that those companies know that any hours my friends put in as chemists rather than their hired job is over-paying those hour rates by a considerable enough amount that they have reason to hire cheaper chemists. I have never seen a software job consider that they may be hugely over-paying a software engineer to do "software development grunt work". Without truly separate job titles and salary considerations that is forever going to be opaque to the accountants at companies.
Long story short: other professions clearly delineate between jobs that are (creative) problem solving and jobs that are more "grunt work" like Ikea-assembling CRUD apps. Why don't we?
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Interesting that I also am learning c++ since some months and I have a very similar feedback as you. Just to add something: > - C++ 20 concepts are a near mirror copy of Rust Traits and enable composition that's an alternative to inheritance, again difficult to find examples of I don't know Rust, but they remind me of Scala traits. I guess it's conceptually the same, and Scala comes first :) > - The features that mak…
> I don't know Rust, but they remind me of Scala traits. I guess it's conceptually the same Rust's traits are typeclasses. Scala's traits are like Java interfaces but more.
Rust's Static traits are used like C++ templates but with more compiler checks and guidance.
In both cases, you can separate the code that implements the trait from the class itself (like a partial class). In Rust you can also retroactively declare a trait and then implement that trait for a class you like (even someone else's class, or a standard class).
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If people think C++ is hard to learn and attracts opinionated people boy are they in for a surprise when they start using Rust.
Learning rust is like cycling over 2 big hills. It’s exhausting and painful if you’re in any way out of shape. Learning C++ is like cycling from SF to LA. It starts easy enough and every day you’re making a lot of satisfying progress. But you have so far to go because of all the features and quirks of the language. It’s probably easier to get started learning C++. But it’s also much faster to finish learning rust and…
I'm also curious what's difficult about pin in rust? It basically just disables moving of the object for the lifetime of the pin.