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by adrien-treuille 2464 days ago
This post combines pretty much every technology I'm obsessed with right now: Python, Rust, Pandas, Numpy, and LLVM. Yess!!!
2 comments

If these things interest you, check out Julia
how do you know someone uses Julia? don't worry they'll tell you.
The same could be said for every Rust fanboy that feels the need to mention Rust whenever an article about C or anything implemented in C is brought up.
Or every C fanboy brings up C whenever Rust is mentioned.

As somebody who uses both, I don’t understand the whole territorial conflicts in this space. Any C programmer can learn a ton by the paradigm Rust uses. Even if Rust would fade into oblivion tomorrow, the lessons I learned by using it will remain valueable enough for me not to regret having learned it.

C is always going to be needed, given the size of the codebase and the amount of embedded stuff written in it. It comes – however – with a waggon full of dangerous traps and gotchas and in practise very few people are good enough to always avoid them or mitigate the risks created by them. I don’t see any reason why C shouldn’t get better in these areas for the benefit of everyone involved.

lets generalize it further: People will take chances to bring up what they are passionate about.

I can relate to this, it is not unreasonable for me.

No disrespect to you but passion in people can come from deep knowledge of a subject but IME much more commonly comes from lack of experience with alternatives.

I've noticed the younger people are the more likely they are to be passionate, which I put down mainly to not knowing any better. Once one has more of the experience that places you higher up where you can see further, suddenly one's own plot of land doesn't seem so special.

Does that justify the snide remarks? We should show more tolerance, there might not be a tool in existence that does not have its disadvantages along with its advantages. Healthy discussion around facts is beneficial, dismissing people for being passionate is not.
The vegans of the programming community.
Just a word of caution, always obsess with product and customer needs first :) In ML/data science tech first normally won’t end up well
It's important to enjoy your work, which is - among other causes - about having right tools. Also, some of us actually get to have some influence over what language we write our projects in.
I think you misunderstand the parent. The obsession to always focus on tools is I think, what they described. In the end of the day what matters is what you produce, not what tools you used. Nobody cares about what you used, apart from engineers.
It’s not mutually exclusive. We are craftsmen and craftswomen. Definitely obsess over the problem but also obsess over the tools used to carve out the most usable elegant and efficient solution.

It’s really asking the same questions over and over again. Can we do better ? Does this tool allow me to be efficient, write safer and faster code, how good is the adjacent libraries and ecosystem ? What other kinds of things does it make it possible to solve?

You care.
Are you coding as a hobby or a profession?

If you are a professional, you will use the most effective tool for the job - to get results. What tool will produce the best results - schedule, budget, quality, maintainability, scalabi, portability, etc.?

Other than outliers that will crush your productivity, or multiply it, your feelings are pretty irrelevant.

Similarly, when you get into a racecar, your feelings about your preferred driving style are irrelevant - if you can change the setup to accommodate your style without slowing jt down, great = but if not, your job is to adapt to the situation and reliably get the best possible result.

Either way, you have fun and produce a crap result, you will not be congratulated (or re-hired), and if you have little fun and produce a great result, you'll get both.

If it's a hobby, do whatever you want.

Obviously, in terms of professional development, you want to use more forward looking tools, but what is the best measure of that - your feelings or results?

I am a professional and I do not choose my tools based on the job.

I choose the best tools for me, invest a lot of time in getting better at them, and choose jobs I can do with minimal changes to my toolset.

To expand your analogy, if I have spent the last few years of my life getting better at driving bulldozers, I will not take any job requiring me to get into a racecar.

> What tool will produce the best results - schedule, budget, quality, maintainability, scalabi, portability, etc.?

Old, boring, mature tools where the limitations are well understood.

> Are you coding as a hobby or a profession?

This isn’t mutually exclusive, surely. If anything you’d expect it to be quite closely correlated.

I sort of disagree with your main assertion. I do big data for a living and what I have seen is that our architecture is dictated to us from above for reasons of "fashion" not really for any reasons of practicality.

I'm actually looking for a different job for that reason.

We are required to used Java on K8s, Kafka & Cassandra for every single solution big or small because it is fashionable, not because it gets the job done well or for any other reason. I can even demonstrate how a couple of Python scripts and Pandas could do all the same work with far less overhead and achieve the same results. Crickets. Python is not sexy where I am, it is the language of peasants, apparently. Not sure what to make of it all, but that is my reality right now.

Also, I don't think you know anything at all about driving race cars. The driver has a tremendous amount of input into the car's setup because it's his life on the line out on the track. "Adapting to the situation" gets finishes, not wins.

People aren't all or always working on products or serving customers.
Unless they are just talking about personal projects?