|
2014 Story Time, when I was a phd student working on programming languages (apologies for my broken English, non native speaker here). The multidisciplinary lab I was in had a "Go or Rust" dilemma. As the language guy, I was asked for my opinion. I had no experience with Go, and a small bad one with Rust: there was weird stuff going on with pointers, and even seemingly simple programs would fail to compile due to a less than happy borrow checker. Working with Rust required a heavy learning investment. On the other hand, Go looked simple, with amazing goroutine, fast compilation time (great for the code/compile loop), and backed by a big company, which is reassuring for then still young languages. As I could not form my opinion on significant coding experience, I looked at the principles. It appeared to me that Rust design was guided by language principles, whereas Go was guided by system/engineering requirements. For example, Rust had generic and sum types, which Go lacked. Rust error are "naturally" dealt with using sum types, whereas Go relied on error codes. Go had that "operating system flavor", with features usually closed to the OS directly implemented in the language (goroutines, which are great).
Rust had that "things are complicated flavor", in both the language (borrow checker, several kind of pointers), and the library (several kind of string?!) which at first is of-putting. Being a language guy, I argued for Rust's good use of language principles over Go's more practical approach. My bet was that Rust usability would improve. A mix of Java/Scala was chosen. I now code in C++... --- --- --- A note on simplicity. Simplicity is a lie. Things (not only programming languages) are not simple, they are messy, hard. Truly hard. In my experience, simplicity claims are usually superficial, and show their limits when going a bit deeper.
As programmers, we like to have simple, generic, abstracted constructs, because it makes our life easier. But the world is not generic; it is full of special cases, corner cases, situations that do not fall in a nice hierarchy, which is its beauty. It took me too long to "accept" this beautiful complexity, and to stop fighting it. If you are still looking for simplicity, maybe check that you are not fighting the world's complexity. |