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

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 4/4/2022 2:07 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
> 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.

Ugly is practically by definition subjective.

>>> 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.

There are no such guarantee.

There are plenty of examples of breaking changes.

Because even when prioritizing compatibility it is easy to make
something not compile - or worse compile with a different semantics.

18 years ago Java added an enum keyword. There were a surprisingly
amount of code using enum as a variable name.

> 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 ?

Rust is almost certainly going through a formal process. All
major languages has to.

Whether that process prioritize compatibility or not is up
the people involved in that process.

Arne