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by cicero
4054 days ago
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I've been programming for 35 years, and I remember when object-oriented programming advocates seemed cult-like. As it turned out, O-O is a very useful tool, but it is not the ultimate programming paradigm. Time has shown that the early adopters of O-O were mostly justified in their enthusiasm, but tended to overstate the benefits of the technology. The O-O naysayers had concerns about performance, which is an issue in some O-O languages, but one that C++ solved. They also had concerns that O-O was hard to understand, but that is something that has been mostly solved through education. These days, the expectation is that a good programmer understands O-O. Today, I see similar reactions to leading edge technologies and languages that are difficult to understand, whether they be FP, Rust, or Haskell. Time will tell whether these things break into the mainstream as did O-O, C++, and Java. I personally think that Rust is onto something, but it is too early to know how much impact it will have on the mainstream. Who knows, 10 years from now, we may see a dominant OS and application ecosystem written completely in Rust that has a level of quality seldom seen today. Or maybe we will see some of the ideas in Rust incorporated into a future version of C++. Or maybe Rust and its ideas will prove to be too impractical and will fade away. I hope to have the time to learn and use Rust soon, but I certainly understand those who prefer to wait and see. What I don't care for is a knee-jerk reaction against something because it is unfamiliar. |
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I wouldn't lump all three together just because they may happen to be somewhat difficult to understand. I see your point regarding FP (and Haskell happens to be an FP language). However, Rust is a multi-paradigm language, just the way C++ is. Time and time again in my day job, I see issues in our code that Rust would have prevented at compile time (and we're not using C++).