[kibwen]

> We didn't see this with Lua, Ruby (that was mainly RoR anyways), Python, Swift, C#, certainly not newer-spec C and C++, or any of the others, even Java back in the day.

I think this is an error of perspective. The hype for Python and Ruby in the mid-2000s was off the charts. And the corporate marketing blitz for Java in the 90s was so beyond extreme that it will never be replicated in the space of programming languages.

Rust has zero marketing budget. The vocal adulation is a result of a confluence of coincidental factors that will never be replicated: an open-source, volunteer-run project from perhaps the only company with the proper combination of funding, technical chops, and open-source cachet to pull it off; an industry landscape that has so long rejected some of the best ideas from academic languages (e.g. tagged unions and pattern matching) that any language who can successfully express them to a non-academic audience will be seen as visionary; a specific niche (safe systems programming) whose exemplar never took off in the realm of FOSS, and who has failed to appeal to most segments of industry for whatever reason, with a ripe potential audience eager for a modern champion; slow-moving competitors in the systems space who had become complacent from lack of competition, and who are prevented from effectively competing at the safety niche without breaking backwards compatibility; a relatively friendly production-ready compiler backend in LLVM that suddenly makes competing in the high-performance cross-platform systems space at all feasible; an audience of newly-minted web devs looking to dip their toes into the systems space without needing to offer the traditional pound of flesh; a focus on standardized tooling that makes onboarding easy and going back to other languages painful; and a totally fortuitous, somewhat accidental, fairly brilliant realization that safe systems programming could be possible in the first place, thanks to a novel combination of affine types and region-based memory management, that worked so well that it took even the creators by surprise. Rust is lightning in a bottle.

[zozbot234]

That wasn't just corporate marketing; Java was the first memory safe language to be widely used in enterprise code, and it led to a lot of C/C++ code being rewritten to address the issue of memory safety bugs. The same may happen with Rust, or perhaps C++ will add facilities for a memory safe subset of the language.

[kibwen]

I want to divorce the marketing from the implementation for a second here; Java was widely used in the enterprise as a C++ replacement because of the marketing blitz, not really because of its technical prowess (with the benefit of hindsight, it's safe to say that Java's marketing vastly overpromised what Java could actually deliver for the first decade or so of the language's life). Note that PHP was the beneficiary of a similar (though smaller) enterprise marketing blitz, and PHP took far longer to get its act together than Java did; these companies were adopting based on what they read in magazines and saw on TV (yes, there were TV commercials for Java!).

[pjmlp]

Java enterprise tooling is based on Smalltalk for a reason....

Likewise the famous Gang of Four book, target at the enterprise space, also uses Smalltalk alongside C++, for the same reason.

Also Visual Age for Smalltalk was the ".NET" of OS/2.

[pohl]

beautiful summary