Given that withoutboats is a long-time major contributor to Rust, I suspect they titled the blog post with the audience of regular readers of their blog in mind rather than a more general audience like Hacker News
> Btw this is the beginning of me trying to shift away from blogging about rust to blogging about PL design in general. I find that I have very little to say about Rust that I haven’t already said.
Right, this is a post which kinda assumes you know Rust, but AFAICT it isn't a post specifically about Rust.
In 2014 that would be extremely presumptuous or targeted at a very niche audience, however in 2024 a lot of people know Rust and so it seems much more reasonable.
Indeed. Rust is the language that the smart kids are using to think about higher-order programming concepts. It has begun to supplant Lisp and Haskell in that regard.
My reference point is Rust because I've worked on or in Rust for most of the past decade, but I think the relevance of Rust for programming language design more broadly is that it is the most well-typed widely deployed imperative programming language. In this way it has an advantage over Lisp or Haskell if you're trying to think about how we might statically analyze imperative programs, which is what I'm personally most interested in.
> Btw this is the beginning of me trying to shift away from blogging about rust to blogging about PL design in general. I find that I have very little to say about Rust that I haven’t already said.