saved you a click: he doesn’t have any experience or knowledge of any of these things, except rust where he has coded one program and didn’t like it
hulitu · 1h ago
> When I tried to figure out what was going on, the language had changed since the last time somebody had posted a description! And so it took days to write a program which in other languages would take maybe five minutes
That rings a bell.
Rust will be much better if it will stick to a stable ABI. We have enough CADT. You found the holy language grail ? Just not deprecate the old stuff.
im3w1l · 3h ago
It's understandable but unfortunate that he had so little to say about them. We could really use the wisdom of true old timers in these matters.
Evidlo · 3h ago
A little disappointed that his answers to "What are you opinions on Rust/Nix/HolyC" were mostly "I don't know about that project"
nromiun · 2h ago
What? But he said this on Rust:
> ‘”I have written only one Rust program, so you should take all of this with a giant grain of salt,” he said. “And I found it a — pain… I just couldn’t grok the mechanisms that were required to do memory safety, in a program where memory wasn’t even an issue!”
Also that Rust is slow. That is not nothing.
postquantumfax · 1h ago
He spent one day on a project at some point.. I spent one week on a project when it was new and I wouldn't judge it today using that week.
MrJohz · 1h ago
Eh, it's not a particularly informed opinion, it's his experience from a brief stint with it where it doesn't really sound like he got enough to grips with it to make much of a judgement.
It's like if I took my brief experiences writing C in uni and summarised it was "it's a pain getting all the different files to compile, and I couldn't work out how to import any useful dependencies" - it's not necessarily a _wrong_ opinion, but clearly it's not a useful one. I just don't have enough experience with C to be able to give you a meaningful opinion on it. It sounds like Kernighan is in a similar boat with Rust.
exe34 · 49m ago
I learnt pointers in C by adding stars until it compiled and then adding ampersands until it stopped segfaulting!
That rings a bell. Rust will be much better if it will stick to a stable ABI. We have enough CADT. You found the holy language grail ? Just not deprecate the old stuff.
> ‘”I have written only one Rust program, so you should take all of this with a giant grain of salt,” he said. “And I found it a — pain… I just couldn’t grok the mechanisms that were required to do memory safety, in a program where memory wasn’t even an issue!”
Also that Rust is slow. That is not nothing.
It's like if I took my brief experiences writing C in uni and summarised it was "it's a pain getting all the different files to compile, and I couldn't work out how to import any useful dependencies" - it's not necessarily a _wrong_ opinion, but clearly it's not a useful one. I just don't have enough experience with C to be able to give you a meaningful opinion on it. It sounds like Kernighan is in a similar boat with Rust.