[TUHS] more about Brian... [really Rust]

[Jon Steinhart]

Adam Thornton writes:
> Do the august personages on this list have opinions about Rust?
> People who generally have tastes consonant with mine tell me I'd like Rust.

Well, I'm not an august personage and am not a Rust programmer.  I did
spend a while trying to learn rust a while ago and wasn't impressed.

Now, I'm heavily biased in that I think that it doesn't add value to keep
inventing new languages to do the same old things, and I didn't see anything
in Rust that I couldn't do in a myriad of other languages.

But, my real issue came from some of the tutorials that I perused.  Rust is
being sold as "safer".  As near as I can tell from the tutorials, the model
is that nothing works unless you enable it.  Want to be able to write a
variable?  Turn that on.  So it seemed like the general style was to write
code and then turn various things on until it ran.

To me, this implies a mindset that programming errors are more important
than thinking errors, and that one should hack on things until they work
instead of thinking about what one is doing.  I know that that's the
modern definition of programming, but will never be for me.

Jon