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

[Dan Cross]

In article <t2n1o9$1fjb$1 at gioia.aioe.org>,
chris  <chris-nospam at tridac.net> wrote:
>On 04/07/22 15:59, Dan Cross wrote:
>> In article<t2l9jp$b8i$1 at gioia.aioe.org>,
>> chris<chris-nospam at tridac.net>  wrote:
>>> On 04/06/22 01:25, Dan Cross wrote:
>>> This sounds like medication to cure everyone from their sloppy
>>> programming. The infantilisation of complex subjects, just to give the
>>> lazy an easier time, while still getting the product built.
>>> The answer to that is not languages that constrain movement, but
>>> developing more professional skills and applying due diligence
>>> and attention to detail to system design and implementation.
>>>
>>> I must be getting old, so what happened to pursuit of excellence
>>> and more ?...
>>
>> Excellent practitioners curate their tools and select the ones
>> that give them the best chance of maximizing the effectiveness
>> of their work products.  Ego driven machismo and disdain for
>> tooling that helps prevent defects is a sign of an amateurish
>> attitude towards software development, not that of a
>> professional, let alone an engineer.
>
>  Agree 100% with that. Good engineers develop their own methods
>and tools as experience accumulates. Having said that, if you
>have been in the business for decades, you know what works and
>what doesn't and what is fluff, so a certain arrogance and
>intolerance of fools is normal. It's not an ego thing, but more
>often hard won experience in product delivery, often against
>the odds.

That's funny.  I've observed things changing significantly
across the industry in the last ~3 decades.

Entire new classes of problems that were once obscure research
domains have become the workaday domain of everyday programmers
(parallel programming, multithreading, distributed systems).
Interactivity has gone from terminals to graphical workstations
to web browsers.  The unit of computing has gone from one CPU to
a multicore machine to a rack to a datacenter and beyond.  We've
gone from "testing" being something lesser humans did to an
accepted practice performed by programmers and carried out in an
automated fashion.

Distributed, scalable systems hosted in geographically dispersed
facilities, often pushed automatically by continuous integration
pipelines fed by distributed revision control repositories are
the new normal for tens of thousands of programmers across the
industry.

So yeah, keep what works (let's be honest: mostly techniques),
but if you're not also keeping up with the changes in technology
you're going to be left behind in an asymptotically shrinking
pool of legacy technology.

>I don't apologise for that. Those who are not prepared to make
>the effort to learn their craft and accept substandard should
>not be in the business, no excuses...

I think it's odd that people reject better tooling while they
assert that programmers should "make the effort to learn their
craft."  Why are these things perceived as mutually exclusive?
Indeed, why isn't part of learning the "craft" adopting better
tooling?  And who suggested accepting substandard results?

On the other hand, those who stick their collective heads in the
sand and pretend that the same old techniques using the same old
tools in the same old way should consider leaving the business.

	- Dan C.