[ncmncm]

The only Haskell program I have heard of normal people using is Pandoc. Some people use Git-annex.

I don't know of any Rust program many people not coding Rust need. There are plenty of rewrites of existing programs, such as ripgrep and alacritty, but neither offer compelling reasons to switch. (Grep speed has never been an issue, for me, and kitty is much faster than alacritty.)

Rust still has no compelling usage story, such as a program that people need that would be so hard to write in some other language, instead, that no one has succeeded. (People talk up Servo, but who is using it?)

[AtlasBarfed]

I am not a rust coder at all. Rust is doing a pretty big and ambitious project that isn't the typical "hey here's a new language to try". Rust goal is to be an ecosystem-mature replacement/alternative for the C/C++ toolchain, libraries, infrastructure.

That's a biiiiiig ask. Absolutely massive. The fact that there is some Linux movement in supporting rust in the kernel shows it is largely successful. While you're right it doesn't rise up to "show me the apps" criticism, it is a big win.

"Show me the apps" is not a criticism that you CAN write apps in it. All I'm saying is that something is culturally wrong, because the people that want to write practical, useful, mass-market software choose NOT to use functional programming, even though it has allegedly massive advantages and superiority.

The lisp essay by Paulie guy is informative: it enabled a really smart programmer to outscale a team of programmers, but it hit its limits. It did not scale beyond that, and was, I suppose, too inscrutable to be picked up and supported by others.

So was it Lisp that allowed him to compete for a while? Or the fact that he wrote it and knew it top to bottom and was really really smart and motivated? Probably a bit of both, I personally would argue 80% superprogrammer, 20% language.

[ncmncm]

The Rust in Linux thing is a lark. Anything you might do in the Linux kernel that you might do in Rust would be much more cleanly and easily achieved in C++, if not for Linus's rabid diatribes: every single thing he criticizes in C++ is in Rust, too. The inventor of the RCU synchronization primitive the kernel relies on spends most of his time with C++.

So, I expect Linux kernel Rust will fizzle, regardless of what happens elsewhere. Maybe Redox will get traction, or Fuschia kernel will be recoded in Rust.