[Info-vax] Rust as a HS language, was: Re: Quiet?

[Simon Clubley]

On 2022-04-04, Dan Cross <cross at spitfire.i.gajendra.net> wrote:
> In article <t2eo9n$mj7$1 at dont-email.me>,
> Simon Clubley  <clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP> wrote:
>>1) The syntax. It's horrible and imposes a higher cognitive load than
>>it needs to when you are looking at something new or revisiting old code.
>>That means you are more likely to miss something or work a lot harder
>>than you need to in order to understand the code.
>>
>>One of the official Ada RMs/Style Guides/etc had it right when it pointed
>>out that you write the code once but read it many times. The Rust people
>>have forgotten this.
>
> Surely this is subjective?
>

All I can say is that I've learnt lots of languages over the years and
the Rust syntax is easily the most ugly I have encountered.

>>2) No official ISO or similar language standard I can rely on 5/10/20 years
>>from now when I need to work on my safety or general production critical
>>code at that point.
>
> This is a valid point.
>
>>Even though many of the Rust people appear not to understand this, the
>>lack of those guarantees is a _massive_ problem in the real world.
>
> But this is just insulting to the Rust people.  They aren't
> fools.  They understand the value of standards, but they're
> still evolving the language.  A standard will come in time.
>

But other languages are also evolving over time, and they do it in
a way that guarantees the next language variant is just another
language mode in the existing compilers. That means I know I can still
compile code written to that old language variant in the years to come.

If the Rust language isn't going through a formal language standards
process, how do I know that I can compile existing Rust code in
5/10/20 years time ?

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Walking destinations on a map are further away than they appear.