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Rust Creator Graydon Hoare Says Current Software Development Practices Terrify Him (twitter.com)
An anonymous reader writes:
On Monday Graydon Hoare, the original creator of the Rust programming language, posted some memories on Twitter. "25 years ago I got a job at a computer bookstore. We were allowed to borrow and read the books; so I read through all the language books, especially those with animals on the covers. 10 years ago I had a little language of my own printing hello world." And Monday he was posting a picture of O'Reilly Media's first edition of their new 622-page book Programming Rust: Fast, Safe Systems Development. Then he elaborated to his followers about what happened in between.
"I made a prototype, then my employer threw millions of dollars at it and hired dozens of researchers and programmers (and tireless interns, hi!) and a giant community of thousands of volunteers showed up and _then_ the book arrived. (After Jim and Jason wrote it and like a dozen people reviewed it and a dozen others edited it and an army of managers coordinated it and PLEASE DESIST IN THINKING THINGS ARE MADE BY SINGLE PEOPLE IT IS A VERY UNHEALTHY MYTH)." He writes that the nostaglic series of tweets was inspired because "I was just like a little tickled at the circle-of-life feeling of it all, reminiscing about sitting in a bookstore wondering if I'd ever get to work on cool stuff like this."
One Twitter user then asked him if Rust was about dragging C++ hackers halfway to ML, to which Hoare replied "Not dragging, more like throwing C/C++ folks (including myself) a life raft wrt. safety... Basically I've an anxious, pessimist personality; most systems I try to build are a reflection of how terrifying software-as-it-is-made feels to me. I'm seeking peace and security amid a nightmare of chaos. I want to help programmers sleep well, worry less."
"I made a prototype, then my employer threw millions of dollars at it and hired dozens of researchers and programmers (and tireless interns, hi!) and a giant community of thousands of volunteers showed up and _then_ the book arrived. (After Jim and Jason wrote it and like a dozen people reviewed it and a dozen others edited it and an army of managers coordinated it and PLEASE DESIST IN THINKING THINGS ARE MADE BY SINGLE PEOPLE IT IS A VERY UNHEALTHY MYTH)." He writes that the nostaglic series of tweets was inspired because "I was just like a little tickled at the circle-of-life feeling of it all, reminiscing about sitting in a bookstore wondering if I'd ever get to work on cool stuff like this."
One Twitter user then asked him if Rust was about dragging C++ hackers halfway to ML, to which Hoare replied "Not dragging, more like throwing C/C++ folks (including myself) a life raft wrt. safety... Basically I've an anxious, pessimist personality; most systems I try to build are a reflection of how terrifying software-as-it-is-made feels to me. I'm seeking peace and security amid a nightmare of chaos. I want to help programmers sleep well, worry less."
Don't know enough about programming languages to recognise a reference to the ML language, even in a tweet that also describes some of its features? Just elide the references you dont understand and replace ML with "machine learning" and you too can be a Slashdot submitter! Don't worry, there are no editors checking that your summary reflects the contents of your links.
The summary say "machine learning" but if you read this feed you'll see it's "ML". ML is programming language.
I know some people are excited about it but Rust is just the language de jure until it gets an actual spec that other people can implement.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
I first learnt C++ 2 decades ago and even I have given up trying to keep up with the latest pointless additions to the language that no one outside a small circle of language geeks was asking for.
I'm having a hard job thinking what those are.
Just about every new addition to C++11 saved major ball-ache at many points in the code, even the somewhat botched initializer_list.
C++14 basically fixed all the weird "WTF this doesn't work" bits from C++11 where the features weren't quite complete in obvious ways (e.g. auto lambdas, return type deduction for normal functions and so on).
Except for binary literals and digit separators. Those were new. and holy-o-fuck are those useful if you're hammering on an SPI bus.
I feel sorry for anyone trying to learn it from scratch today as the learning curve eventually gets as close to vertical as you can get in a programming language.
It's vertical if you try to learn modern C++ as 20 year old C++ with extra features. That's not the optimal way to learn it, because then you're stuck with all the misdesigns of the old features with a whole pile of new ones. It's the way we learned it of course, because we learned C++ then C++98 then C++11.
It's bad in the same way that it's bad learning C++98 as C with a bunch of new features. You get the worst combination of complexity overload and feature overload. Again we did it, but I wouldn't teach someone new that way.
Stroustrup has a book on learning modern C++, and it's very well written and makes the curve much gentler.
I very much doubt you need it to learn C++, but I think it's a good read if you're in the position of teaching or mentoring since it sheds a whole new light on how it comes together for new programmers.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Your logical fallacy is: ignoratio elenchi.
The liar is you.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Something that I find disturbing is that I actually saw this exact comment before. Why are you copy-pasting this over and over again?
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
I went back to C++, because even if it isn't a perfect language, at least it's a decent language with a honest, open, friendly community.
C++ is arguably the most complicated, the hardest to learn, general purpose programming language in use today. And, in the last seven years, with the last three major revisions, C++ has become, I would estimate, three or four times harder than it was before. If you were to start from ground zero, it would take you much longer than 2-3 years in order to be fully versed in all the arkane features of it. I would say that to become fully proficient in C++, when starting from absolutely nothing more than general knowledge of computer programming, will take at least 5-7 years, maybe even ten.
Because of that, experienced C++ developers tend to be older, and with many many years of experience under their belt. They've outgrown the phase of their lives where they think themselves to be #1 hot-shit masters of the universe. We're older now. We know better.