If C++ has undefined behavior, Rust has childish behavior
If C++ has undefined behavior, Rust has childish behavior
(joke in the title stolen from a redditor)
Context: some Rust kid vandalized cppreference.com today.
That kid is an asshole because cppreference is doing the lord's work.
Also, I know that language choice is one of the most important decisions when starting a new project but, personally, I work on a highly performance sensitive project that's written in PHP. If you think you need Rust to be performant or type safe then you don't really know what you're doing yet. It makes it easier and increases theoretical limits - that is all.
93Is PHP strongly typed?
3It's a choice left up to developer but you can have static and runtime type checking enabled for as many functions as you desire. Theoretically you can have collection subtype checking but I'd say that PHP is still quite frail here as proper collection typing lacks any template-style typing but needs dedicated collection types.
3
then you don't really know what you're doing yet.
Can you elaborate on this? How are you guys making PHP so performant? Do you call C programs from it or something?
2No, we just use good algorithmic approaches including an emphasis on lazy evaluation. It'd take out application like 20x as long to compute 2+2 compared to one written in C but computation in PHP isn't our main bottleneck - it's efficient network connection handling and psql query performance.
Our PHP code is maintainable and expressive that makes it much easier to tune performance where it counts.
15
As someone who learned a lot from C++ and that now loves Rust, this annoys me.
54An attitude I've seen a lot among software developers is that basically there aren't "good languages" and "bad languages." That all languages are equal and all criticisms of particular languages and all opinions that some particular language is "bad" are invalid.
I couldn't disagree more.
The syntax, tooling, standard library, third-party libraries, documentation quality, language maintainers' policies, etc are of course factors that can be considered when evaluating how "good" a language is. But definitely one of the biggest factors that should be considered is how assholeish the community around a particular language is.
A decade or two ago, Ruby developers had a reputation for being smug and assholeish. I can't say I knew a statistically significant number of Ruby developers, but the ones I did know definitely embodied that stereotype. I've heard recently that the Rust community has similar issues.
The Rust language has some interesting features that have made me want to look deeper, but what I've heard about the community around Rust has so far kept me away.
I write Java for a paycheck, but for my side projects, Go is my (no pun intended) go-to language. I've heard nothing but good things about its community. I think I'll stick with it for a while.
40But definitely one of the biggest factors that should be considered is how assholeish the community around a particular language is.
I think all of the factors you've mentioned are extremely valid, but this is the one factor that I think should absolutely not count into whether something's a 'good' or 'bad' language. If I'm choosing which technologies to use for my next project, the question of whether it has a rude vocal minority in its community is AS FAR DOWN on my list as possible. Right next to whether its name is hip or whether their homepage is engaging.
25Yeah, but the shittiness of a shitty community will come through in documentation that talks down to you and doesn't dain to explain things properly. And then when you go and ask a question because it wasn't well explained in the documentation and get derided for asking.
Fanboys are also likely to mislead (including in documentation) by downplaying caveats in libraries and such. Documentation can end up being more like marketing speak than technical reference.
You speak of "vocal minorities", but I don't think it's quite as simple as that. Languages have cultures around them. (As do lots of other things. Video games. Hardware devices. Car brands. What have you.) If a language has a toxic community around it, it might be an indication that the people behind the language may lack the ability or motivation to maintain a better community. Or worse, that they're doing things that promote or attract the shittiness.
So, in short, I disagree with you. For one thing "everything about this language is great except its community is shitty" makes me suspicious that maybe everything about the language isn't great and it has a really fanboyish community that likes to suppress any (even legitimate) negativity. Where I have to, I use the language I have to use, but when I have a choice, a shitty community is generally a deal breaker for me.
12
Pretty sure syntax is the only one that is even related to what a language is. All the rest are just ecosystem development primarily effected by popularity.
12And the ecosystem affects whether when I run into an obstacle, I can google for 5 minutes to find the solution or whether I'll spend the next three days trying dozens of incorrect approaches suggested by StackOverflow answers and random comments on language-specific forums and Wordpress blog posts etc. Whether you consider "the ecosystem" part of the language or not, it's worth considering when choosing a language to work in.
9
Are you me? I know the joke is overused, but, seriously... that was a comment I would have written.
So wierd.
2In my experience the actual rust community that you'll be seeing if you work with the language is actually incredibly nice and open minded. It's got a lot of autistic people and other minorities who are more emotionally mature than a lot of adults. Rust people can be smug sometimes talking to "outsiders" but once you're in the community the problem disappears
1Blaming others for your own shortcomings in being able to pick up a language is the same kind of behavior as some kid on League blaming everyone else on his team except himself for failing a match.
Stop letting a community dictate your use of effective tools, whether it be C++, rust, python, or air fryers.
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