[pie_flavor]

It should not be strange that a tool which is better in every way and makes your code less buggy by default has its praises sung by most of the people who use it. It would be odd to go around saying 'electric drills are strangely and disproportionately pushed at Home Depot over the good old hand auger', and even if I don't work at your contracting company I'd be slightly unnerved about you working on my house.

[agentultra]

I’ve heard this analogy used to justify firing developers for not using GenAI: a cabinet maker who doesn’t use power tools shouldn’t be working as a cabinet maker.

If only programming languages (or GenAI) were tools like hammers and augers and drills.

Even then the cabinets you see that come out of shops that only use hand tools are some of the most sturdy, beautiful, and long lasting pieces that become the antiques. They use fewer cuts, less glue, avoid using nails and screws where a proper joint will do, etc.

[pie_flavor]

Less glue and avoidance of nails and screws doesn't make it sturdier. Fastening things strongly makes your furniture sturdier than not doing so. Antiques suck as often as they don't, and moreover you are only seeing the ones that survived without a base rate to compare it to; they succeeded in spite of power tools, but power tools would have made the same object better.

Comparing it to AI makes no sense. Invoking it is supposed to bring to mind the fact that it's worse in well-known ways, but then the statement 'better in every way' no longer applies. Using Rust passively improves the engineering quality compared to using anything else, unlike AI which sacrifices engineering quality for iteration speed.

[layer8]

The thing is that more than a few people disagree that it is better in every way.

[andrepd]

I'm very much into Rust but this article is precisely about the fact that Rust is not "better in every way"...

[kibwen]

This article was written nine years ago, when Rust 1.0 was two years old, by an author who spent a small (but nonzero) amount of time evaluating Rust.

[ActorNightly]

The issue is that Rust proponents automatically assume that if you write enough C code, there will be memory related bugs.

In reality, this is not the case. Bad code is the result of bad developers. Id rather have someone writing C code that understands how memory bugs happen rather than a Rust developer thinking that the compiler is going to take care of everything for them.

[waffletower]

The topic seems to be native programming languages -- I don't think any of the languages concerned are "better in every way" for every possible coding problem. Many will rightfully choose Fortran over Rust for their application -- knowing full well their choice is far away from "better in every way".

[pklausler]

When writing code meant to last, you need a language that’s portable across compilers and through time. C has demonstrated both. Fortran 77 and 90 were portable across compilers, but are now at risk from breaking changes, and later versions are not very portable across compilers.

[hu3]

Bad analogy.

If the alternative has drawbacks (they always do) or is not as well known by the team, it's perfecly fine to keep using the tool you know if it is working for you.

People who incessantly try to evangelise their tool/belief/preferences to others are often seen as unpleasant to say the least and they often achieve the opposite effect of what they seek.

[anthonypasq]

of course there are drawbacks to power tools. you could run out of battery for example and now its useless.

but everyone with a brain knows the costs are worth the benefits.