Mail Archives: geda-user/2015/07/07/15:13:19
On 07/07/2015 02:23 PM, Stefan Salewski wrote:
>> This sets off some alarm bells for me. I'm a professional
>> developer;
>> I write code every day and I like to stay on top of new research, and
>> I've never even heard of most of the languages you mentioned here.
>> I've
>> heard of Go, and Python, Ruby, and Java, of course, but Nim? Crystal?
>> Rust?
>
> Rust is really popular today -- it is pushed by mozilla foundation. I
> know it since some years, recently version 1.0 appeared. It it really a
> promising language, has some similarity to C++ and Swift. I discovered
> Nim in early 2014 following the discussion about Rust, and Crystal early
> this year. Julia should be familiar to people doing Mathlab like stuff.
I've heard of Julia but only in passing.
I'd be a bit concerned about Rust if its primary proponent is the
Mozilla foundation. This is the company that writes the entirety of a
very complex user interface in runtime-interpreted JavaScript. This was
a bad idea when it started (with the web browser whose actual name was
Mozilla) and it's no better of an idea now. The runtime performance
bears this out. Don't get me wrong, I love Firefox, but there's no
earthly reason why, in 2015 on a computer with six 3.2GHz cores, 48MB of
of cache, and 24GB of main memory, that I should have to restart a
program every 2-3 weeks because it slows to a crawl...taking 20-30
seconds to open a new window. This does not speak well to the
high-level architectural decisions of that organization, as much respect
and gratitude as I do otherwise have for them.
So perhaps some other statement of advocacy might nudge me in the
direction of investigating Rust.
> But none of them is a pet language, and they are not difficult and
> academic like Haskell.
Yes. I've tried REALLY HARD to like Haskell but its syntax is just
horrible.
> But for FOSS -- development should be some fun. Is C fun? And do you
> like coding something in C, which you can do in 1/3 of the time with 1/3
> code size, same speed, less bugs, in a better language?
All of that is purely subjective. FOR ME, yes, C is nearly the
ultimate in fun. My C code has far fewer bugs than my code in nearly
any other language, my code size (the binary...which is all that really
matters!) is a fraction of anything else, and "better"...well that just
spells "subjective" right there.
Dif'rent strokes, etc.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
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