Remembering Drew Devault is the Fox News of programming bloggers. He exhibits the same sort of bad faith obtuseness, and knee-jerk neck beard tech conservatism, that makes me/many want to scream.
First, his thesis is risible. "Rust is not a good C replacement". Note, Drew does not mean replace C code with Rust code, but Rust, the language, literally replacing C, the language. Ignoring, perhaps, Rust doesn't want to "replace" C, because we have C!
Next, see the bulleted text. Upon each topic something interesting might be said re: Rust, but instead they all serve a garbage thesis that Rust can never be the 50 year old language that the tech world is currently built upon. Well, duh.
My least favorite, though, is the final bullet:
> Safety. Yes, Rust is more safe. I don’t really care. In light of all of these problems, I’ll take my segfaults and buffer overflows.
And everyone wants to be a cowboy and watch things blow up when they are 8 years old.
What does that article have to do with this article? The author of the latter article even says that they don’t enjoy writing C, which is kind of the opposite of what your article says
The community has been very supportive of the gccrs (https://github.com/Rust-GCC/gccrs) project, which is the main project to write a Rust compiler written in C.
The changes into industry definitely coming. But AI will affect not only programming. And handmade products will cost more than autogenerated ones.
Programming started sucks before when companies started to orient on fast income and preferred pure quality templated projects over well-made efficient ones.
This world changes. Many people have nothing to do and with AI amount of them will grow. It scare.
This is true at any instant in time, but it fails miserably over time as support and feature enhancement becomes important. A poor design from an LLM that cannot be updated, fixed, maintained, and improved is an issue that affects customers.
All those generated code would still need to be maintained, no? What happen when the customer found a bug and demand it to be fixed? Would the AI able to find the buggy code and fix it?
I mean, I'm not in charge or anything, but my personal opinion is that if you have questions to ask, that is what 'Ask HN' is for, so if you formulate discussion you'd like to have into such a thing, it is fair game. But if you want to post your own thoughts, and then see how people react, just blog it and share a link. (As long as you share more than just your own stuff as well.)
The world is full of possibilities, so for sure it's not true and cannot be true for all of us.
Someone moved from C, others didn't move.
I am trying to point not so on C, but on tendention in general.
Capitalistic companies dictate to us what technologies to use.
Money became a higher priority than engineering.
Can you say to your boss "No, stack you using sucks, I will use X language and libraries"? I know that someone can for sure, but most of us can't.
> Can you say to your boss "No, stack you using sucks, I will use X language and libraries"? I know that someone can for sure, but most of us can't.
Yes and no. I can say what sucks, and I'm consulted on how to do things, but I don't have authority to unilaterally choose a direction most of the time (on subsystems I have more, maybe even total, freedom, on the whole system I do not). I also don't have the ultimate responsibility for those things that I cannot make the decisions on, which is a good thing since I lack the authority to make those decisions. No responsibility without authority.
> Capitalistic companies dictate to us what technologies to use. Money became a higher priority than engineering.
This is true. If you want it to change, though, it comes at a high cost. To reprioritize engineering you need to shift who holds responsibility for the system and its outcomes. If you want authority, you also need to accept responsibility (possibly even criminal liability, like PEs assume in some of their work). No company (or no competent company) will dole out authority willy-nilly. You want that authority, you need to accept an appropriate level of responsibility and liability.
I have started learning programming with Turbo Pascal. Actually with BASIC. But Pascal became my favorite 25 years ago, and then moved to Borland Pascal, it was magic times - handmade games, algorithms... I felt myself a sorcerer making miracle things. Nowadays I feel myself an outcast in the world of templates, who writes his own libraries for corporate projects.
Thank you for your advice. I have not looked into Pascal long time. Can you advice some resources, repos, communities?
