Someone once told me a benefit of staffing a project for Haskell was it made it easy to select for the types of programmers that went out of their way to become experts in Haskell.
Tapping the Rust community is a decent reason to do a project in Rust.
It's an interesting debate. The flip side of this coin is getting hires who are more interested in the language or approach than the problem space and tend to either burn out, actively dislike the work at hand, or create problems that don't exist in order to use the language to solve them.
With that said, Rust was a good language for this in my experience. Like any "interesting" thing, there was a moderate bit of language-nerd side quest thrown in, but overall, a good selection metric. I do think it's one of the best Rewrite it in X languages available today due to the availability of good developers with Rewrite in Rust project experience.
The Haskell commentary is curious to me. I've used Haskell professionally but never tried to hire for it. With that said, the other FP-heavy languages that were popular ~2010-2015 were absolutely horrible for this in my experience. I generally subscribe to a vague notion that "skill in a more esoteric programming language will usually indicate a combination of ability to learn/plasticity and interest in the trade," however, using this concept, I had really bad experiences hiring both Scala and Clojure engineers; there was _way_ too much academic interest in language concepts and way too little practical interest in doing work. YMMV :)
If you're doing something forgettable, what makes you think the workaday Java or Python programmer would find it innately motivating?
Alternately, if you have the sort of work or culture that taps into people's intrinsic motivation, why would that work worse with Haskell or Clojure programmers than anybody else?
People are interested in different things along different dimensions. The way somebody is motivated by what they're doing and the way somebody is motivated by how they're doing it really don't seem all that correlated to me.
Paul Graham said the same thing about Python 20 years ago [1], and back then it was true. But once a programming langauge hits mainstream, this ceases to be a good filter.
This is important. The benefit here isn't the language itself. It's the fact that you're pulling from an esoteric language. People should not overfit and feel that whichever language is achieving that effect today is special in this regard.
I'm my experience this is definitely where rust shined. The language wasn't really what made the project succeed so much as having relatively curious, meticulous, detail-oriented people on hand who were interested in solving hard problems.
Sometimes I thought our teams would be a terrible fit for more cookie-cutter applications where rapid development and deployment was the primary objective. We got into the weeds all the time (sometimes because of rust itself), but it happened to be important to do so.
Had we built those projects with JavaScript or Python I suspect the outcomes would have been worse for reasons apart from the language choice.
Rust is also a systems language. I am still wrapping my mind around why it is so popular for so many end projects when its main use case and goals were basically writing a browser a maybe OS drivers.
But that’s precisely why it is good for developer tools. And it turns out people who write systems code are really damn good at writing tools code.
As someone who cut my teeth on C and low level systems stuff I really ought to learn Rust one of these days but Python is just so damn nice for high level stuff and all my embedded projects still seem to require C so here I am, rustless.
> having relatively curious, meticulous, detail-oriented people on hand who were interested in solving hard problems.... Had we built those projects with JavaScript or Python I suspect the outcomes would have been worse for reasons apart from the language choice.
I genuinely can't understand why you suppose that has to do with the implementation language at all.
bri3d|2 months ago
With that said, Rust was a good language for this in my experience. Like any "interesting" thing, there was a moderate bit of language-nerd side quest thrown in, but overall, a good selection metric. I do think it's one of the best Rewrite it in X languages available today due to the availability of good developers with Rewrite in Rust project experience.
The Haskell commentary is curious to me. I've used Haskell professionally but never tried to hire for it. With that said, the other FP-heavy languages that were popular ~2010-2015 were absolutely horrible for this in my experience. I generally subscribe to a vague notion that "skill in a more esoteric programming language will usually indicate a combination of ability to learn/plasticity and interest in the trade," however, using this concept, I had really bad experiences hiring both Scala and Clojure engineers; there was _way_ too much academic interest in language concepts and way too little practical interest in doing work. YMMV :)
tikhonj|2 months ago
Alternately, if you have the sort of work or culture that taps into people's intrinsic motivation, why would that work worse with Haskell or Clojure programmers than anybody else?
People are interested in different things along different dimensions. The way somebody is motivated by what they're doing and the way somebody is motivated by how they're doing it really don't seem all that correlated to me.
mannycalavera42|2 months ago
Calavar|2 months ago
[1] https://paulgraham.com/pypar.html
jghn|2 months ago
discreteevent|2 months ago
mkoubaa|2 months ago
steve_adams_86|2 months ago
Sometimes I thought our teams would be a terrible fit for more cookie-cutter applications where rapid development and deployment was the primary objective. We got into the weeds all the time (sometimes because of rust itself), but it happened to be important to do so.
Had we built those projects with JavaScript or Python I suspect the outcomes would have been worse for reasons apart from the language choice.
IgorPartola|2 months ago
But that’s precisely why it is good for developer tools. And it turns out people who write systems code are really damn good at writing tools code.
As someone who cut my teeth on C and low level systems stuff I really ought to learn Rust one of these days but Python is just so damn nice for high level stuff and all my embedded projects still seem to require C so here I am, rustless.
zahlman|2 months ago
I genuinely can't understand why you suppose that has to do with the implementation language at all.