lmao this is the most thinly veiled “rust makes me feel old and itrelevant” take I’ve read all year, but it’s only February https://antirez.com/news/145
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I don't think much of those points speak to Rust specifically, but rather IMHO some of these problems bleed into Rust too. Software as a profession has been a mess for decades, part of why I took the security research path.
I hate this constant neglect of the cost of not doing something.
His critiques are all valid, but dwarfed by the cost of not rewriting, not innovating languages and frameworks, not using quality dependencies.
He's a curmudgeonly medieval weaver complaining about mechanized looms while people freeze
This shit reads like ass, generic complaints with no substance like fuck you mean by these? No elaboration?
Hmm yes well vetted dependencies instead of rewriting a lot from scratch by yourself (to be human is to be flawed), and innovations in the PL space are bad for software!
Rust makes me feel old but that's because I am and I work with some brilliant young engineers. The future is bright and they have the skill and tools to make it so.
yeah, there might be some context that connects this to rust, but of the 14 points in the link, AFAICT one could be interpreted as anti-rust and one could be interpreted as pro-rust (and even those interpretations might be a stretch)
This reads like the suckless manifesto from 2007 and it still feels just as cringe as it did then.
It also appears to both decry rewriting things but also be in favor of reinventing the wheel. Isn’t that contradictory?? Or is it only good wheel reinventing if you use the same material (c89)?
> We are destroying software telling new programmers: “Don’t reinvent the wheel!”.
> We are destroying software pushing for rewrites of things that work.
I’m thinking of that “engineers are right a lot” piece that was going around HN recently and I’m not sure about that, but they sure have that god complex
(I might be wrong about antirez's target but given the current climate (memory safety being pushed by gov), the timing (Rust4Linux drama), and his background , I have my suspicions. Muting now though!)
i feel like the keyword in the first sentence is 'new' programmers, they are discouraged by many to try writing their own DB or protocol or whatever they're curious about, as it's already a "solved problem"
it's something i grew fond of watching @tsoding.bsky.social's streams, I do not want 10 build system files when cloning a repository, nor should I care about some algorithm being already implemented 100x times with better security and performance if I actually want to learn it
are we destroying software by getting suckered in by NIH and reinventing the wheel, or are we destroying software by not reinventing the wheel? cause i can't really see how it's both.
also like half of these criticisms have been problems since the inception of software development as a discipline
actually wait a minute i don't think he's talking about NIH syndrome with that first one. I think he's saying we should always rewrite things from scratch because then they'll be tailored for us.
but then he also says we shouldn't be pushing for rewrites of things that work so 🤷♂️
Funny enough I love Rust because it gives me a lot of things they complain about in this post. A sane build system, strong backwards compatibility, doesn’t waste system resources, etc.
A lot of this seems to be shifting between software as a craft, software project management philosophy, and software as a set of habits a programmer engages in and they are very, very different things.
"Move deliberately and build stuff" is actually good advice, surgical programming is a useful skill, and decision paralysis is often a protective condition to overhauling load-bearing systems.
The problem is that when you build something you're having a conversation with your user.
There's a lack of empathy inherent in putting things in a position to break catastrophically due to complexity introduced on a whim, and also by not paying down techdebt because you intransigently assumed the 80s would never end.
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His critiques are all valid, but dwarfed by the cost of not rewriting, not innovating languages and frameworks, not using quality dependencies.
He's a curmudgeonly medieval weaver complaining about mechanized looms while people freeze
Hmm yes well vetted dependencies instead of rewriting a lot from scratch by yourself (to be human is to be flawed), and innovations in the PL space are bad for software!
It also appears to both decry rewriting things but also be in favor of reinventing the wheel. Isn’t that contradictory?? Or is it only good wheel reinventing if you use the same material (c89)?
«We are destroying software, and what will be left will no longer give us the joy of hacking.»
The right sentence ends like this:
„(...) what will be left will no longer give others the joy of hacking us.“
The rest is 100% wrong tho. Not a passing grade x3
> We are destroying software pushing for rewrites of things that work.
🤔🤔🤔
Now it mostly feels like when I apply it, it's to angry transphobes/racists/sexists who sometimes have very repulsive ideas about e.g. children
At least John McCarthy's already dead
this guy though, no problem
> We are destroying software by always underestimating how hard it is to work with existing complex libraries VS creating our stuff.
pick one
also like half of these criticisms have been problems since the inception of software development as a discipline
but then he also says we shouldn't be pushing for rewrites of things that work so 🤷♂️
The problem is that when you build something you're having a conversation with your user.
it's way too ambiguous