tech.lgbt is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
We welcome all marginalized identities. This Mastodon instance is generally for folks who are LGBTQIA+ and Allies with an interest in tech work, academics, or technology in general.

Server stats:

2.9K
active users

Public

Rust is indeed woke [diziet.dreamwidth.org]. It's woke technology that embodies a woke understanding of what it means to be a programming language.

Blog post, by me.

diziet.dreamwidth.orgCaptcha Check
Public

@Diziet I agree with this post, and think it's an insightful perspective.

However, I think Rust faces a challenge with complexity. I completely failed to get any of the rest of the team to work on a Rust project I'd developed on leaving my last programming job cos they got stuck learning Rust (before they saw my code!)

Folk found things like co-/contra-variant lifetimes befuddling. I couldn't even convince people they need to know the difference between heap and stack. Not least, management stripped this exact question out of hiring interviews.

Things like async are a mistake, I think. (A mistake I used in my project until I understood why), mainly because of the way they pile on things like pinning. I coped okayish, but the project failed because I was the only compsci degree-er.

I worry that Rust is turning into C++

I don't really think Rust can hope to be inclusive while it require so befuddling concepts. I hold out hopes for maybe Zig (I've not learnt it).

I have no problem with the community.

@chiffchaff I do agree that Rust faces a challenge with complexity.

But, I think the problem in the language is much less severe than often imagined. One can write eg Easy Mode Rust [llogiq.github.io] - which is still a highly performant and reliable language.

I certainly wouldn't bother novices with lifetime variance; that's advanced stuff which you hardly ever have to worry about (and as ever, either if builds it's fine, or you're an expert doing unsafe). I think "heap vs stack" is another thing novices can ignore.

It doesn't help that there's still a fair amount of perf hacker thinking even in resources for total newbies.

A very real challenge is the way that Rust programs almost never compile first time, which can be deeply offputting to people who've been socialised to be afraid of error messages. I wish we could somehow persuade folks that compiler errors are completely normal and fine, so they feel free to go ahead and experiment.

llogiq.github.ioEasy Mode Rust — Llogiq on stuff