I can actually see where this is coming from, as I found Rust hard to read when I started out. I do really like Rust for reference, but I do agree Rust is hard to read for someone that has not learned it.
For example:
return statements that are implicit just because the semicolon isn’t there. Even better if they occur inside a if block or something like that. Very hard to understanding when you don’t know the syntax rules.
Lambda functions, especially when using move semantics too. They are quite simple, but if you don’t know the meaning, it’s more arcane characters. Especially when this is used inside lots of chained methods, and maybe a multi-line function in the lambda.
A lot for the if let x =… type of stataments are tough the first time around. Same for match statements.
Defining types for use with function::<Type>() and such.
Lifetimes, especially when they are all named a, b, c etc. It quickly gets messy, especially when combined with generics or explicitly defined types.
Macros, though not entry level rust to begin with, they are really cumbersome to decode.
None of these are sins of Rust, but for new people they are a hill to climb, and often hard to just “get” based on previous programming experience and reading the code. Rust can be really hard to approach because of these things. This happens in other languages too, but I do feel Rust has a particularly large amount of new concepts or ways to do something. And this is on top of learning lifetimes and borrow semantics.
This is the most sober take in this thread. I was bothered by all these things you mentioned for the first two weeks of using the language. I begrudgingly accepted them for the following two months because I felt the benefits of the language were worth it. Now all of these things feel natural and I don’t give them a second thought.
They might not be strictly language issues, but if they are symptomatic of idiomatic rust then they are “sins of rust”. Something about the language promotes writing it using these kinds of idioms.
Just like French speakers don’t pronounce 80% of the written syllables because it’s impractical to speak fast with all of them…language features (or lack of them) drive how the language is used.
(BTW the implicit return behaviour on a missing semicolon sounds like Chekhov’s footgun)
Something about the language promotes writing it using these kinds of idioms.
As someone who has used Rust professionally for 3 years, the idioms are good. I wouldn’t want the idioms to go away, and I don’t particularly want the style/aesthetics of the language to change unless it can be done without negatively affecting the idioms.
It’s not a situation where the aesthetics are actually bad, it’s just different than what most programmers are used to, but almost all of the differences are for pretty good reasons. With enough familiarity and practice you’ll start to recognize those differences as benefits of the language rather than detriments.
But I think a lot of people have so much inertia about tweaking their way of thinking that they don’t feel motivated to try long enough to make it over that hump, especially when their expectations get set by rabid Rust promoters like myself who insist that Rust is vastly superior to any other languages in almost all situations. The stark contrast between how good they’re told the language is and how they feel when first exposed to it might be too much whiplash for some people.
The implicit return is perhaps the most dubious of them. I don’t mind it for simple functions, but they are not so good in anything large and with multiple return sites. Even more so when developers choose to implicitly return 4 chained method calls inside a closure with else cases.
But the rest aren’t really sins, they are mostly new or different concepts or ways to do something. And if there is a sin, it’s largely because the language itself has a complexity larger than others.
Taking my own examples here, lambdas are just fine, but the move semantics are cumbersome to deal with. But we need to do it some way, to indicate that a value is actually being moved into the closure. Maybe there are better ways and they make into the language in the future.
Conditional values and let statements and such is a good consequence of Rusts design choice with returning Results or Option types. Just because it’s different doesn’t make it a sin. Just takes time to learn the right way. I think most come from an exception based language, and that has a differnet code flow than what Rust has.
Lifetimes are hard though, and I feel a lot of the introduction is made excessively hard with the simple naming. It’s as of every programming tutorial used single letter variable names. Lifetimes isn’t something I’m that good with either, mostly because I haven’t had to use that complexity yet.
Entirely readable to someone who knows Common Lisp, and unreadable to someone who doesn’t know any kind of Lisp. Mostly readable to someone who knows Emacs Lisp, Clojure, or Scheme.
Being able to correctly guess what the syntax does without knowing the language is a function of similarity to familiar languages more often than it is a characteristic of the syntax itself.
Maybe Emacs has fried my brain, but that is perfectly readable. Common Lisp has one of the most advanced object systems around, so yea you can write hard to read stuff if you want
well if you are recompiling thousands of crates with a single thread, for a simple webapp no less, then you are doing something wrong. multiple things, actually, I count 3.
You used macro_rules, which is not common at all. Most rust files don’t contain any macro definition.
This code doesn’t even compile. There is a random function definition, and then there are loose statements not inside any code block.
The loop is also annotated, which is not common at all, and when loops are annotated it’s a blessing for readability. Additionally, the loop (+annotation) is indented for some reason.
And the loop doesn’t contain any codeblock. Just an opening bracket.
Also, the function definition contains a lifetime annotation. While they are not uncommon, I wouldn’t say the average rust function contains them. Of course their frequency changes a lot depending on context, but in my experience most functions I write/read don’t have lifetime annotations at all.
Yes, what you wrote somewhat resembles rust. But it is in no way average rust code.
One of the reasons i find it so hard to use non-Rust languages is how ugly they typically are by comparison. “fn” instead of “function” is such a great example of saving key presses where they’re most needed. And you get very used to seeing compact abbreviations. Idk if that’s what you’re talking about though.
To be honest, I think, they both have their place. In Rust, you typically wouldn’t return just a bool, but rather the element that you removed, so like this:
I believe that it is useful in a few places. cppreference.com mentions templates as one case:
Trailing return type, useful if the return type depends on argument names, such as template<classT, classU> autoadd(Tt, Uu) -> decltype(t + u); or is complicated, such as in auto fpif(int)->int(*)(int)
The syntax also matches that of lambdas, though I’m not sure that adding another way of specifying regular functions actually makes the language more consistent, since most code still uses the old style.
Additionally, the scope of the return type matches the function meaning that you can do
Ooh yeah, overall coding culture is definitely not affected by the preferred nomenclature for identifiers. The person who’s habituated to fn over function will absolutely never name their functions in the vein of chkdsk. The two are completely disconnected in the brain of the programmer who read too much K&R in their childhood and was irretrievably traumatized by it for life.
I’d say it’s much more influential the names of the identifiers of the standard library.
A language with function keyword that names it’s stdlib functions strstr and strtok will inspire way worse naming than on that has fn keyword with stdlib functions str::contains and str::split.
We could search for a random crate on crates.io and see what identifiers people actually use, or we could spread misinformation on Lemmy.
Perl is ugly but great. It’s like shell scripting with a more solid programming language. I’d never use it outside of simple scripts in my os, but whenever I do use it it’s very fun. Anyway, yeah, rust looks fine to me. Maybe they are not very experienced with it? I know some of my programs used to have lines with just x.unwrap().unwrap().unwrap() or whatever, which is not pretty.
I know some of my programs used to have lines with just x.unwrap().unwrap().unwrap() or whatever, which is not pretty.
That goes away with experience, though. At least, I can’t think of a reason why you’d nest three Results or Options. Normally, you would collate them right away.
The most you see in the wild is something like Result<Option<_>> to express that a check can fail, but even if it doesn’t, then a valid result can still be that there is nothing there.
If you don’t care that your program crashes (like .unwrap() does), then anyhow is the error handling library of choice. With it, you can just write a ? in place of an .unwrap() for practically any error type. And well, it automatically combines the errors, so you won’t be writing ??? either.
Enums and nested blocks. I understand the importance of Option and Result, but it’s fucking infuriating when I have to check and destructure the result of every function call and either bubble the result up the stack from six levels of nested iflet blocks or risk Cloudflaring my program by using .unwrap(). And while I like being able to extract a return value from an if...else expression, the structure gets really convoluted when multiple if and match blocks are nested (of course each one returning a value), and it gets completely fucked once closures are introduced.
Most of the times you can just let ... else (which is basically a custom ? if you neediflet ... else it’s because you actually need 2 branching code paths. In any other language you also do if ... else when you have 2 different code branches. I don’t see why this is a rust-specific issue.
But really it’s the exact same as other languages, it just forces you to handle it better. C-based languages will return 0/null/-1 and you’ll have to check all 3 of those because they might not mean the same thing. How is that better?
This isn’t about some feature of the language being good or bad. It’s about Rust being ugly or not. The things I mentioned will always look ugly in the source code.
It’s hilarious to me that people talk about “ugly” as if their opinions are objective.
I found Rust unpleasant to look at for the first two weeks of learning it, and now that I’ve been using it professionally for three years I loathe when I need to read code in other languages.
No other language can rival Rust in showing the exact information needed to understand the code — never too much and never too little — while being concise, correct, and handling all edge cases.
You can be more concise in other languages, but it will come the loss of handling every little possible bug. You can be prettier in other languages, but it will come at the price of adding a lot of useless boilerplate.
Of course there are cases where Rust can be verbose or confusing, but that’s when you’re doing very esoteric things that would be just as confusing in other languages.
Like any opinion on aesthetics, how someone feels about the prettiness of a language will have far more to do with familiarity than with any objective metrics.
Sadly there’s still no truly good way to handle errors in rust. TBH I’m not sure if we as an industry have figured out an efficient, foolproof, composable, not overly verbose way to handle errors, so it’s not entirely on Rust.
Rust allows you to choose whatever method you want.
Early return propagating the error
Early return ignoring the error (maybe by returning a default value)
Explicit handling by if-else (or match) to distinguish between error and not error cases.
Early return and turn the error into another type that is easier to handle by the caller.
Assume there is no error, and just panic if there is. (.unwrap)
There are only 2 error handling methods that you cannot do:
Exceptions
Ignore the error and continue execution
And that is because both of them are bad because they allow you to do the second one, when .unwrap is just there and better.
If your concept of “not ugly” is “I just want to see the happy path” then you either write bad code that is “not ugly” or write good code that is “ugly”. Because there is no language that allows you to handle errors while not having error handling code near where the errors are produced.
Yeah, I was gonna say, error handling easily makes up 80+% of the code paths, and depending on whether you’re building a library or service or script etc., different strategies are most suitable for how to deal with those code paths.
In a script, you often just want it to crash. In a library, you want to make these code paths matchable, in case the user cares why something failed. And then you have the awkward in-between, which is that 99% of your application codebase will be used by your main-function like a library, but you don’t want to spend as much effort on error handling for that as a proper library does, in particular also because you know what all consumers of your application-library need to know.
So, it’s kind of multiple different problems, with overlap, and people are hoping for one easy solution to cover all these problems.
Key point being, similar to some random languages. JS and Python Syntax don’t fit a typed and compiled language at all.
Pretty syntax would probably be something like C, where not every single character already widely reserved for specific keywords (like !, ', =) is reused in completely random ways.
Ah yes I also found macro syntax like vec
Almost any language is OK, but Rust is just so, so fucking ugly
Not to stereotype too much but I think this is the first Blåhaj I’ve seen (in a programming context) that wasn’t team Rust.
What your programming language of choice (if you don’t mind sharing)?
The account is feddit…
Shark avatar, though.
I can actually see where this is coming from, as I found Rust hard to read when I started out. I do really like Rust for reference, but I do agree Rust is hard to read for someone that has not learned it.
For example:
return statements that are implicit just because the semicolon isn’t there. Even better if they occur inside a if block or something like that. Very hard to understanding when you don’t know the syntax rules.
Lambda functions, especially when using move semantics too. They are quite simple, but if you don’t know the meaning, it’s more arcane characters. Especially when this is used inside lots of chained methods, and maybe a multi-line function in the lambda.
A lot for the if let x =… type of stataments are tough the first time around. Same for match statements.
Defining types for use with function::<Type>() and such.
Lifetimes, especially when they are all named a, b, c etc. It quickly gets messy, especially when combined with generics or explicitly defined types.
Macros, though not entry level rust to begin with, they are really cumbersome to decode.
None of these are sins of Rust, but for new people they are a hill to climb, and often hard to just “get” based on previous programming experience and reading the code. Rust can be really hard to approach because of these things. This happens in other languages too, but I do feel Rust has a particularly large amount of new concepts or ways to do something. And this is on top of learning lifetimes and borrow semantics.
This is the most sober take in this thread. I was bothered by all these things you mentioned for the first two weeks of using the language. I begrudgingly accepted them for the following two months because I felt the benefits of the language were worth it. Now all of these things feel natural and I don’t give them a second thought.
I think that’s a great set of criticisms.
They might not be strictly language issues, but if they are symptomatic of idiomatic rust then they are “sins of rust”. Something about the language promotes writing it using these kinds of idioms.
Just like French speakers don’t pronounce 80% of the written syllables because it’s impractical to speak fast with all of them…language features (or lack of them) drive how the language is used.
(BTW the implicit return behaviour on a missing semicolon sounds like Chekhov’s footgun)
As someone who has used Rust professionally for 3 years, the idioms are good. I wouldn’t want the idioms to go away, and I don’t particularly want the style/aesthetics of the language to change unless it can be done without negatively affecting the idioms.
It’s not a situation where the aesthetics are actually bad, it’s just different than what most programmers are used to, but almost all of the differences are for pretty good reasons. With enough familiarity and practice you’ll start to recognize those differences as benefits of the language rather than detriments.
But I think a lot of people have so much inertia about tweaking their way of thinking that they don’t feel motivated to try long enough to make it over that hump, especially when their expectations get set by rabid Rust promoters like myself who insist that Rust is vastly superior to any other languages in almost all situations. The stark contrast between how good they’re told the language is and how they feel when first exposed to it might be too much whiplash for some people.
The implicit return is perhaps the most dubious of them. I don’t mind it for simple functions, but they are not so good in anything large and with multiple return sites. Even more so when developers choose to implicitly return 4 chained method calls inside a closure with else cases.
But the rest aren’t really sins, they are mostly new or different concepts or ways to do something. And if there is a sin, it’s largely because the language itself has a complexity larger than others.
Taking my own examples here, lambdas are just fine, but the move semantics are cumbersome to deal with. But we need to do it some way, to indicate that a value is actually being moved into the closure. Maybe there are better ways and they make into the language in the future.
Conditional values and let statements and such is a good consequence of Rusts design choice with returning Results or Option types. Just because it’s different doesn’t make it a sin. Just takes time to learn the right way. I think most come from an exception based language, and that has a differnet code flow than what Rust has.
Lifetimes are hard though, and I feel a lot of the introduction is made excessively hard with the simple naming. It’s as of every programming tutorial used single letter variable names. Lifetimes isn’t something I’m that good with either, mostly because I haven’t had to use that complexity yet.
Go look at that Lisp kojumbo then tell me Rust is ugly.
(defmethod wake ((object magic-packet) address port) (let* ((payload (encode-payload object)) (size (length payload)) (socket (usocket:socket-connect nil nil :protocol :datagram :element-type '(unsigned-byte 8)))) (setf (usocket:socket-option socket :broadcast) t) (usocket:socket-send socket payload size :host address :port port) (usocket:socket-close socket)))Actually unreadable.
It’s like comparing Hitler to Stalin. Both are pretty shit… Two things can be ugly at the same time. 😅
Entirely readable to someone who knows Common Lisp, and unreadable to someone who doesn’t know any kind of Lisp. Mostly readable to someone who knows Emacs Lisp, Clojure, or Scheme.
Being able to correctly guess what the syntax does without knowing the language is a function of similarity to familiar languages more often than it is a characteristic of the syntax itself.
Maybe Emacs has fried my brain, but that is perfectly readable. Common Lisp has one of the most advanced object systems around, so yea you can write hard to read stuff if you want
Compared to untyped languages? Sure. Compared to C or C++? Then maybe it’s a skill issue 😋
Almost any language is ok but some ecosystems make me want to turn into a murder hobo (looking at you, JavaScript).
Try using luarocks with luajit.
Also looking at Rust. Yeah, I totally like recompiling thousands of crates for a single webapp single-threaded.
well if you are recompiling thousands of crates with a single thread, for a simple webapp no less, then you are doing something wrong. multiple things, actually, I count 3.
Hard disagree. Super beautiful.
Average Rust code:
macro_rules! sum { ( $initial:expr $(, $expr:expr )* $(,)? ) => { $initial $(+ $expr)* } } fn remove_prefix<'a>(mut original: &'a str, prefix: &str) -> &'a str let mut up = 1; 'outer: loop {Hell I don’t want to know what you define as ugly then.
What language are they then? They’re not Python, JS, <insert any other language here>
You used macro_rules, which is not common at all. Most rust files don’t contain any macro definition.
This code doesn’t even compile. There is a random function definition, and then there are loose statements not inside any code block.
The loop is also annotated, which is not common at all, and when loops are annotated it’s a blessing for readability. Additionally, the loop (+annotation) is indented for some reason.
And the loop doesn’t contain any codeblock. Just an opening bracket.
Also, the function definition contains a lifetime annotation. While they are not uncommon, I wouldn’t say the average rust function contains them. Of course their frequency changes a lot depending on context, but in my experience most functions I write/read don’t have lifetime annotations at all.
Yes, what you wrote somewhat resembles rust. But it is in no way average rust code.
I don’t know if anyone would argue Rust macros are beautiful. If someone does they should be checked out by a doctor.
Speaking as a fan of Rust.
One of the reasons i find it so hard to use non-Rust languages is how ugly they typically are by comparison. “fn” instead of “function” is such a great example of saving key presses where they’re most needed. And you get very used to seeing compact abbreviations. Idk if that’s what you’re talking about though.
Rust:
fn getofmylawn(lawn: Lawn) -> bool { lawn.remove() }C:
bool getofmylawn(Lawn lawn) { return lawn.remove(); }With Rust you safe 1 char, and gain needing to skip a whole line to see what type something is.
Honestly, the Rust way of doing things feels much more natural to me.
You can read it as
getoffmylawn,Lawnargument namedlawn,boolWhereas the C function is read as
bool? Could be a variable, could be a function, could be a forward declaration of a function,getoffmylawn,(, so all options are still on the table,Lawnargument namedlawn, that returns aboolSo that’s why people like C-style return types. That actually makes a lot of sense. I do too now.
To be honest, I think, they both have their place. In Rust, you typically wouldn’t return just a
bool, but rather the element that you removed, so like this:fn getofmylawn(lawn: Lawn) -> Option<Teenager> { lawn.remove() }And then with such a more complex return-type, C-style means that you can’t see the function name right away:
Option<Teenager> getofmylawn(Lawn lawn) { return lawn.remove(); }I also really don’t think, it’s a big deal to move your eyes to the
->…Amusingly, modern C++ allows you to copy the rust signature nearly 1:1:
auto getofmylawn(Lawn lawn) -> Option<Teenager> { return lawn.remove(); }Huh, did that emerge out of unrelated design decisions or did they just figure
I believe that it is useful in a few places. cppreference.com mentions templates as one case:
The syntax also matches that of lambdas, though I’m not sure that adding another way of specifying regular functions actually makes the language more consistent, since most code still uses the old style.
Additionally, the scope of the return type matches the function meaning that you can do
auto my_class::my_function() -> iterator { /* code */ }instead of
my_class::iterator my_class::my_function() { /* code */ }which is kinda nice
Very interesting, thanks! 🙂
Yeah, the most beautiful code is where all variables are just letters of the alphabet.
Keywords aren’t variables
Ooh yeah, overall coding culture is definitely not affected by the preferred nomenclature for identifiers. The person who’s habituated to
fnoverfunctionwill absolutely never name their functions in the vein ofchkdsk. The two are completely disconnected in the brain of the programmer who read too much K&R in their childhood and was irretrievably traumatized by it for life.I’d say it’s much more influential the names of the identifiers of the standard library.
A language with
functionkeyword that names it’s stdlib functionsstrstrandstrtokwill inspire way worse naming than on that hasfnkeyword with stdlib functionsstr::containsandstr::split.We could search for a random crate on crates.io and see what identifiers people actually use, or we could spread misinformation on Lemmy.
Tell me this is sarcasm
what? what part of rust is ugly?
Maybe they’re confusing the literal name with the language? Idk.
I grew up on Perl and holy fuck… Rust is fine.
Perl is ugly but great. It’s like shell scripting with a more solid programming language. I’d never use it outside of simple scripts in my os, but whenever I do use it it’s very fun. Anyway, yeah, rust looks fine to me. Maybe they are not very experienced with it? I know some of my programs used to have lines with just x.unwrap().unwrap().unwrap() or whatever, which is not pretty.
That goes away with experience, though. At least, I can’t think of a reason why you’d nest three Results or Options. Normally, you would collate them right away.
The most you see in the wild is something like
Result<Option<_>>to express that a check can fail, but even if it doesn’t, then a valid result can still be that there is nothing there.If you don’t care that your program crashes (like
.unwrap()does), thenanyhowis the error handling library of choice. With it, you can just write a?in place of an.unwrap()for practically any error type. And well, it automatically combines the errors, so you won’t be writing???either.I’m learning Perl - purely for fun - and yeah… it’s a little funky.
Enums and nested blocks. I understand the importance of
OptionandResult, but it’s fucking infuriating when I have to check and destructure the result of every function call and either bubble the result up the stack from six levels of nestedif letblocks or risk Cloudflaring my program by using.unwrap(). And while I like being able to extract a return value from anif...elseexpression, the structure gets really convoluted when multipleifandmatchblocks are nested (of course each one returning a value), and it gets completely fucked once closures are introduced.I like Rust, but calling it pretty is delusional.
Most of the times you can just
let ... else(which is basically a custom?if you needif let ... elseit’s because you actually need 2 branching code paths. In any other language you also doif ... elsewhen you have 2 different code branches. I don’t see why this is a rust-specific issue.You can also use let else.
let (Some(count\_str), Some(item)) = (it.next(), it.next()) else { panic!("Can't segment count item pair: '{s}'"); };But really it’s the exact same as other languages, it just forces you to handle it better. C-based languages will return 0/null/-1 and you’ll have to check all 3 of those because they might not mean the same thing. How is that better?
I like to use
unwrap_or()to define fallback values. TheOptionAPI is quite expressive.I’ll start using this one
Learn how to use enum error types, how error bubbling works, and how to convert between Options and Results.
It’s Rust you are talking about, not Go.
This isn’t about some feature of the language being good or bad. It’s about Rust being ugly or not. The things I mentioned will always look ugly in the source code.
It’s hilarious to me that people talk about “ugly” as if their opinions are objective.
I found Rust unpleasant to look at for the first two weeks of learning it, and now that I’ve been using it professionally for three years I loathe when I need to read code in other languages.
No other language can rival Rust in showing the exact information needed to understand the code — never too much and never too little — while being concise, correct, and handling all edge cases.
You can be more concise in other languages, but it will come the loss of handling every little possible bug. You can be prettier in other languages, but it will come at the price of adding a lot of useless boilerplate.
Of course there are cases where Rust can be verbose or confusing, but that’s when you’re doing very esoteric things that would be just as confusing in other languages.
Like any opinion on aesthetics, how someone feels about the prettiness of a language will have far more to do with familiarity than with any objective metrics.
Sadly there’s still no truly good way to handle errors in rust. TBH I’m not sure if we as an industry have figured out an efficient, foolproof, composable, not overly verbose way to handle errors, so it’s not entirely on Rust.
Rust allows you to choose whatever method you want.
There are only 2 error handling methods that you cannot do:
And that is because both of them are bad because they allow you to do the second one, when .unwrap is just there and better.
If your concept of “not ugly” is “I just want to see the happy path” then you either write bad code that is “not ugly” or write good code that is “ugly”. Because there is no language that allows you to handle errors while not having error handling code near where the errors are produced.
Yeah, I was gonna say, error handling easily makes up 80+% of the code paths, and depending on whether you’re building a library or service or script etc., different strategies are most suitable for how to deal with those code paths.
In a script, you often just want it to crash. In a library, you want to make these code paths matchable, in case the user cares why something failed. And then you have the awkward in-between, which is that 99% of your application codebase will be used by your main-function like a library, but you don’t want to spend as much effort on error handling for that as a proper library does, in particular also because you know what all consumers of your application-library need to know.
So, it’s kind of multiple different problems, with overlap, and people are hoping for one easy solution to cover all these problems.
Sum types with associated values are worth it
Literally every single bit of the syntax.
The majority of its syntax is very similar to many other languages. Can you give an example of a language with pretty syntax?
Key point being, similar to some random languages. JS and Python Syntax don’t fit a typed and compiled language at all.
Pretty syntax would probably be something like C, where not every single character already widely reserved for specific keywords (like !, ', =) is reused in completely random ways.
Ah yes I also found macro syntax like
vec![andprintln!(to be a bit jarring at first. However I don’t know if I would say that C’s approach to macros is any nicer, with it’s#definemagicBeing unable to give an actual example proves you’re just a foaming-mouth hater with nothing to contribute.
From the first syntax examples on Wikipedia:
fn main() { let foo = 10; // Suddenly, types are implicit now. A safe language should never have implicit types (now it's the (IDEs) implementations judgement which type that is. Combined with the variable shadowing "feature", this seems like a major clusterfuck. Now the IDE is the sole thing to tell you that you totally fucked up the logic, and both declarations/definitions (well which one is it? Would be nice to always have a direct KEYWORD telling you which type this fucking variable has. But no, the lazy piece of shit Rust 'programmer' left that as an exercise to the dear reader. Because in they just need to leave that part out instead of explicitly stating "I'm a lazy piece of shit" by *instead* typing 'auto'.) This is just Python-level BS. Yes, I also hate C++ for its auto keyword - but at least it explicit. println!("The value of foo is {foo}"); let foo = 20; println!("The value of foo is {foo}"); }fn add_two(x: i32) -> i32 { // That is, again, the syntax of Python. Why? Because Python is explicitly untyped. So having types be a *literal* afterthought is Ok. They're fully optional anywhere there. Now we're in Rust. They're sometimes optional, sometimes not, but they're always preferred. Yet, they're also an afterthought, seemingly. x + 2 // Implicit statements are bad. Very bad. They so much invite to glossing over stuff, especially when your brain expects to see something else. Also, having every statement ended with ;, except context blocks, but suddenly *not* having statements ending with ;, is fucking ugly (which is the entire point of this rant). It's completly inconsistent. Which in itself is a huge magnet for errors. }if x > 5 { // Now why would you leave the parantheses, which are a major contributor to readability, away. Or even allow this. Rust is just memory safe, like dozens of other mainstream languages, but continues by allowing, promoting and requiring hazardous practices. println!("value is greater than five"); }Now I’m slowly getting annoyed from typing on phone (at least in nvim), and my throat gets clogged with mucus again.
Remember, some of that are subjective preferences and opinions. And the core idea of Rust - fast but safe programs - is good, yet very obvious and not innovative at all, while the syntax and implementation (of cargo (yes I like to wait an hour for a simple webapp to compile because there aren’t binary crates and cargo just doesn’t multicore 99% of the time)) is subpar to something that’s hailed as the savior for everyone and everything by such a large cult.
“not having mandatory parenthesis in if statements is hazardous, so I prefer to write C instead of rust, because I really care about safety” < that’s how you sound.
In practice, type inference in Rust is not a problem since the language is so strongly typed. In fact, it is more strongly typed than both C and C++, and will force you to cast values explicitly in cases where C and C++ will happily mess up your variables without warning. The absence of type inference would also be a major pain, since nested types such as iterators can get quite complex and very verbose. If you’ve programmed using older C++ standards, then you know this pain
Types are not implicit, they’re inferred by the compiler when there is no ambiguity about what the type needs to be. This is a huge benefit for refactoring code and reducing maintenance. I acknowledge that sometimes you might care to know the exact type of the variable, and sometimes that’s not as easy for a human to infer as it is for the compiler, but every decent IDE will provide inline type hints for you. Interpreting code by reading it in plaintext is an exercise in masochism.
Python is actually the opposite on this, and it’s one of Python’s worst characteristics. The type is unknown until runtime unless you annotate it, and then the annotation isn’t really enforced. It’s the worst of every dimension.
C++11 introduced auto, and now the community is split between “almost always auto” and “never auto”.
JavaScript needed a whole new compiled language (Typescript) to fix its type system problems, and Typescript is only an incremental improvement at best.
Rust has the best type system of any modern language by far. If you’re tripped up by not always seeing the type declarations then you’re either focusing on the wrong details in the code or you just need a little more practice. The key thing that needs to sink in for new Rust users is that the compiler is always providing safety rails. That means it’s no longer your job to verify that every aspect of the code is correct. You can relax a little and actually have something akin to duck typing without all the pitfalls that usually come with it.
Sorry for intrusion, but mhm, nah. I get it there are people who want to play around and have language/compiler babysit them, but there are also people like me who want to see exactly what something is. So no, Rust, just like JavaScript, can be liked by some people, but it is in no way something that has “best type system”
There actually is no such thing as best type system, same way there is no such thing as best language
then go ahead and explicitly define the type of every variable. rust wont stop you from doing that
I can go ahead and just not use Rust to begin with, what is your point?
If you don’t realize that
x = 10denotes an integer of some default length, and thaty = 10.0is a float, then the language isn’t the problem.I am not gonna look for first x= expression when I want to know type
This is a false dichotomy when it comes to Rust. Despite everything I said and despite Lucy’s complaint, there is nothing that actually stops someone from explicitly annotating the exact type when declaring a variable. It’s just not required by the language, and most developers eventually realize that it’s not actually useful.
You’re right that these preferences are subjective, be although much of that subjectivity has more to do with how our past experiences have shaped what we’re familiar with, rather than any intrinsic characteristics of person. By that I mean, someone who uses Rust enough will most likely come to like the way the general community styles its code, sooner or later. In the meantime you’re welcome to do things in a way that suits your needs.
The only thing that Rust’s type system is weak on is runtime reflection. There are ways to achieve it within Rust’s type system, but it’s considerably more work than what you get in Python and JavaScript. Imo the only reason to choose a language other than Rust for a greenfield project is if you have a strong need for runtime reflection all over the place and aren’t very concerned about performance, threading, or avoiding entire categories of bugs that the Rust compiler protects you from.
or that I don’t want to twist my brain with Rust way of things. But I agree with you on everything else :)
If you don’t understand how having any statement be an expression is useful, you don’t have enough experience to criticize programming languages.
Average Rust code:
macro_rules! sum { ( $initial:expr $(, $expr:expr )* $(,)? ) => { $initial $(+ $expr)* } } fn remove_prefix<'a>(mut original: &'a str, prefix: &str) -> &'a str let mut up = 1; 'outer: loop {This is on the level of the esolang I made at 8 y/o, with random characters denoting random actions everywhere, at random positions.
It’s incredibly disingenuous to call this average Rust code and further erodes your credibility. I may as well point to hundreds of lines of preprocessor macros in a C++ header and call it average C++ code.
This is not what an average Rust developer is writing 99% of the time. If someone on my team submitted a PR with an implementation of
sumthat usesmacro_rules!I would almost certainly reject it.FORTRAN isn’t a beauty either.
And Python is strange as hell with its mandatory tabs.
You can use spaces in Python.
Indentation-driven control flow is one of the most cursed things ever invented, excluding things explicitly designed to inflict pain or death.
Haskell has the choice of both indentation based and brackets for things like
doblocks, but most people use indentation based cause it’s the norm and looks cleanerWhite space sensitive languages are evil.
Two, three or four spaces? If you answer wrong I’ll never forgive you
No one will ever know. That is my editor’s job. XD
Per the Linux kernel coding style:
Whatever your place defines as a standard. I’ve seen ugly code in C, JavaScript, Java, etc., that uses them all over the place because they’re not mandatory.
If you don’t have consistent indenting, your code looks like copy/paste from several sources; but if you do have consistent indenting, then the indenting of Python is a non-issue.
I’m rather partial to five myself but only when I’m feeling fancy.
Yes
List comprehensions are much stranger than tabs vs spaces. There are very very very few languages that use them, and python’s is by far the worst out of the popular ones.
Skill issue. Once you learn them they are quite fun.
The concept of a list comprehenshion is sinple but syntax is awful, as if Yoda was writing a for loop. “x for x in y it is, hmm yes”.
Wasn’t the python convention to use spaces (4 iirc)? Which is just plain wrong imho.
most repos use 4 spaces
This is the one thing I hate about python, because the spacing would differ between editors. I used vim to create the files on one system, and geany to edit them on another. Via uses 8 spaces in a tab (at least for me), while geany uses 4. This makes python mad, and drives me crazy.
Also, the rules for whitespace separation between things like loops, methods, and the rest of the code is annoying/ wierd (at least to me).
You know that editors let you change their defaults, right?
and that indentation defaults in decent editors are usually language dependent. I’m not familiar with these editors, but… come on - if they use one default for all files, OP should use a better tool.
Yes, but I don’t normally program in python, so I never did. When I had to, I never thought of changing it (it wasn’t for long anyways and was less of a thought out decision to do programming in vim)
Get a code formatter. Ruff is popular. So is black. Never think about it again.