Before I read the rest of this thread (I did read the original post) I'll
point out this is definately my sort of territory.

I've been a professional programmer and sysadmin since the late 1970's.
I have used 100 programming languages in my career. It takes me an hour
to learn a new one. I've been hired to write in languages I didn't
know, and I didn't even bother to learn two of them after getting the
job.

I've not bothered with Rust yet, but the hype about it reminds me af the
hype around Ruby in the beginning. I was heavily into Java programming
at the time, and Ruby was trying WAAAAY too hard to take over Java. The
Rust hype reminds me of the Ruby hype. They even share the first half of
the spelling.

Given my history I consider my self justified in being a computer
language bigot. I hate any that start with the letter P, and those
starting with R are looking to join that list.


So much for my first reaction. Let's see what everyone else wrote.

On 2024-05-28 17:16:42, Steve Litt wrote:
> I've looked into the newer languages like rust and go and Julia, and
> they don't work for me.
>
> As far as Julia, it's buggy as hell.
>
> With go and rust, these languages seem much broader than C, Python,
> Lua, old school Turbo Pascal and the like.
>
> What I mean by "broader" is that you need to memorize a whole lot of
> stuff because a whole lot of stuff is built into the language instead
> of just being createable in the language.
>
> As a counterexample, take C. C has very few commands and keywords to
> remember. Learn =, ==, <, >, if, while, for, struct, typedef, arrays
> and pointers and a small portion of the standard library and you're
> good to go. When you need to do something, you don't search for a
> command to do it, you just make it. If you didn't know about memcpy(),
> you could write it in about 6 lines of C.
>
> When I tried to learn go by taking a tutorial, the first three lessons
> all went well. Then, the next few lessons required me to remember more
> and more and more commands to the point where I couldn't hang.
>
> It's a little like the difference between math and history. With math
> you learn a few (perhaps difficult) principles and techniques, and all
> you have to do is apply the correct techniques in the correct order to
> do what you want. Very little memorization. With history, everything
> has at least two parties, a date, and an outcome. Trivial to learn, but
> difficult to remember. All I remember from history is that the Normans
> took over England in 1066, and the US declared independence in 1776.
> But I still remember enough high school and college math to be somewhat
> formidable, because principles are hard to forget. C is like math, go,
> and as I remember also rust, are more like history.
>
> SteveT
>
> Steve Litt
>
> Autumn 2023 featured book: Rapid Learning for the 21st Century
> http://www.troubleshooters.com/rl21
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--
A big old stinking pile of genius that no one wants
coz there are too many silver coated monkeys in the world.