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

[Dan Cross]

In article <t2jh5l$75s$1 at dont-email.me>,
Chris Townley  <news at cct-net.co.uk> wrote:
>On 06/04/2022 01:41, Dan Cross wrote:
>> Disclaimer: I'm good friends with a number of the Go core team
>> folks.  Go and Rust are very complementary, with Go being great
>> for engineering large project with many programmers working in
>> parallel in a shared code base, and Rust being great for
>> low-level bit-twiddly kinds of applications.
>> 
>> Go isn't so awesome at the kinds of low-level bare-metal
>> applications that Rust excels at, however, as it has a very
>> substantial runtime and expects a lot of OS support (projects
>> like Tamago and Biscuit/GERT not withstanding).
>
>[snip]
>
>Simon says he dislikes the syntax of Rust - I took a quick look at Go, 
>and found that I didn't like it's syntax. Horrible, IMHO

I sort of recall the language wars of the late 80s and early 90s
wherein people argued vehemently over whether `begin`/`end` or
curly braces where innately superior to one another, or whether
a block should open with a token on the same line as, say, a
conditional or start on the next line.

Looking at the matter now, I find that I just can't bring myself
to care all that much, particularly as we now have automated
tools that do reasonble (if imperfect) jobs of formatting code
to some standard in a uniform fashion.  Arguments that used to
take up inordinate amounts of mental and emotional energy are
now settled by the machine.  This is a good thing.

After working for a number of years in an O(10^9)-LOC codebase,
I found that the enforced uniformity was essential to cutting
down on cognitive load and understanding what was going on, even
if the mandated style wasn't one I preferred or found pleasing
aesthetically; any place where one can cut down in inessential
complexity is a good thing in large software systems.  After a
few weeks it becomes invisible.

There are some languages with irredemably bad syntax, but once
you get beyond those, it just doesn't matter.

	- Dan C.