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by yolo69420 1534 days ago
Even if it sounds like it makes sense, something tells me that these (not just this one, all of these kinds of 'why x and y is happening') are really after-the-fact rationalizations after some dev or devs decided to engage in a pet project that would have happened even if it had no sensible justifications at all.
3 comments

FWIW we did two pretty extensive proof-of-concept prototypes (one in pure C++ and one in Rust) before choosing Rust for this project. I, personally, thought that we would choose C++. I'm a big "choose boring technology" advocate. [1]

In other words, we tried hard to document a lot of before-the-fact rationalizations to go with the inevitable after-the-fact rationalizations. :-)

[1] https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology

I do that all the time. is anything wrong with that? Sometimes you go and build something to solve a specific problem, and realize it solves lots of different things.

I don't think it matters what the Daily team originally intended. It is exciting/inspiring to me that they are trying to solve things differently. I think security for RTC is really important, so seeing more memory safe language usage makes me hopeful for the future.

All this new code also means people are really learning what goes into these problems. A whole new generation of coders are getting into the space and rethinking things. It is great.

Why do you say that?
it's just kind of obvious from looking at the distribution of these kinds of posts. lots of people posting blogs about why they use x and y new technology with these objectively good reasons to do so, and then two years later everyone jumps on another pet project hype train.

it seems like these reasons to do something mysteriously only stay valid for the short period of time in which a technology has some kind of hype status and quickly fades when people realize that it's actually not that much improvement in practice and the hassles (training devs in new language, worse language ecosystem etc.) aren't actually worth it.

I'd be interested to see follow-up posts by these companies later. As an example, my former employer started using Rust in 2017 and is still happily and productively using it today, but they only put out a blog post when they started, and they haven't talked about it since.