Some things just need precise terminology so humans can communicate about them to humans without ambiguity. It doesn't mean they're inherently complex: the article provides simple definitions. It's the same for most engineering, science and language. One of the most valuable skills I've learned in my career is to differentiate between expressions, statements, items, etc. - how often have you heard that the hardest problem in software development is coordinating with other developers? If you learn proper terminology, you can say exactly what you mean. Simple language doesn't mean more clear.
I wasn't born knowing Rust, I had to learn it. So I'm always surprised by complaints about Rust being too complex directed at the many unremarkable people who have undergone this process without issues. What does it say, really? That you're not as good as them at learning things? In what other context do software people on the internet so freely share self-doubt?
I also wonder about their career plans for the future. LLMs are already capable of understanding these concepts. The tide is rising.
Rust instead has all these implicit things that just happen, and now needs ways to specify that in particular cases, it doesn't.
Rust tries to prevent developers from doing bad things, then has to include ways to avoid these checks for cases where it cannot prove that bad things are actually OK. Zig (and many others such as Odin, Jai, etc.) allow anything by default, but surface the fact that issues can occur in its API design. In practice the result is the same, but Rust needs to be much more complex both to do the proving and to allow the developers to ignore its rules.
[1]: https://ziglang.org/documentation/0.15.2/std/#std.math.divEx...
I'd be interested if this weren't true, since the only feasible compiler solutions to preventing division-by-0 errors are either: defining the behaviour, which always ends up surprising people later on, or; incredibly cumbersome or underperformant type systems/analyses which ensure that denominators are never 0.
It doesn't look like Zig does either of these.
[0]: https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/#Division-by-Zero
People say "Rust is more complex to onboard to, but it is worth it", but a lot of the onboarding hurdle is the extra complexity added in by experts being smart. And it may be a reason why a language doesn't get the adoption that the creators hoped for (Scala?). Rust does not have issues with popularity, and the high onboarding barrier, may have positive impact eventually where "Just rewrite it in Rust" is no more, and people only choose Rust where it is most appropriate. Use the right language for the tool.
The complexity of Rust made me check out Gleam [0], a language designed for simplicity, ease of use, and developer experience. A wholly different design philosophy. But not less powerful, as a BEAM language that compiles to Erlang, but also compiles to Javascript if you want to do regular web stuff.
This can happen in any language and is more indicative of not having a strong lead safeguarding the consistency of the codebase. Now Scala has had the added handicap of being able to express the same thing in multiple ways, all made possible in later iterations of Scala, and finally homogenised in Scala 3.
Thing is, the alternative to "smart" code that packs a lot into a single line is code where that line turns into multiple pages of code, which is in fact worse for understanding. At least with PL features, you only have to put in the work once and you can grok how they're meant to be used anywhere.
Don't get me wrong, rust has plenty of "weird" features too, for example higher rank trait bounds have a ridiculous syntax and are going to be hard for most people to understand. But, almost no one will ever have to use a higher rank trait bound. I encounter such things much more rarely in rust than in almost any other mainstream language.
* no-panic: https://docs.rs/no-panic/latest/no_panic/
* Safe Rust has no undefined behavior: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39564755
1. Go with a better type system. A compiled language, that has sum types, no-nil, and generics.
2. A widely used, production, systems language that implements PL-theory up until the year ~2000. (Effects, as described in this article, was a research topic in 1999).
I started with (1), but as I started to get more and more exposed to (2), you start looking back on times when you fought with the type system and how some of these PL-nerds have a point. I think my first foray into Higher-Kinded Types was trying to rewrite a dynamic python dispatch system into Rust while keeping types at compile time.
The problem is, many of these PL-nerd concepts are rare and kind of hard to grok at first, and I can easily see them scaring people off from the language. However I think once you understand how they work, and the PL-nerds dumb down the language, I think most people will come around to them. Concepts like "sum types" and "monads", are IMO easy to understand concepts with dumb names, and even more complex standard definitions.
I was looking for something like that and eventually found Crystal (https://crystal-lang.org) as a closest match: LLVM compiled, strong static typing with explicit nulls and very good type inference, stackfull coroutines, channels etc.
I would love to introduce more rust at work, but I dread that someone is going to ask about for<'a>, use<'a>, differences between impl X vs Box<dyn X>, or Pin/Unpin, and I don't have proper answers either.
I didn't understand that you were making fun of verbosity until the word 'domicile'. I must be one of those insufferable people who expresses simple thoughts with ornate vocabulary...
The article was comprehensible to me, and the additional function colorings sound like exciting constraints I can impose to prevent my future self from making mistakes rather than heavy winter gear. I guess I'm closer to the target audience?
Rust requires actual reading, like Typescript, only more detailed.
And later, when I read "Because though we’re not doing too bad, we’re no Ada/SPARK yet" I couldn't help thinking that there must be a reason why those languages never became mainstream, and if Rust gets more of these exciting esoteric features, it's probably headed the same way...
As a user, using a feature such as pattern types will be natural if you know the rest of the language.
Do you have a function that accepts an enum `MyEnum` but has an `unreachable!()` for some variant that you know is impossible to have at that point?
Then you can accept a `MyEnum is MyEnum::Variant | MyEnum::OtherVariant` instead of `MyEnum` to tell which are the accepted variants, and the pattern match will not require that `unreachable!()` anymore.
The fact someone does not know this is called "refinement types" does not limit their ability to use the feature effectively.