Person interested in programming, languages, culture, and human flourishing.

  • 6 Posts
  • 31 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • I mean, the simple proof is that Rust has been growing by leaps and bounds in the embedded world, which is the closest to bare metal you get. It’s also being used in the Linux kernel and Windows, and there are several projects building new kernels in pure Rust. So yeah, it’s safe to say that it’s as close to the metal as C.

    Also, the comparison to Java is understandable if you’ve only been exposed to Rust by the memes, but it doesn’t hold up in practice. Rust has a lot more syntax than C (although that’s not saying much), but it’s one of the most expressive languages on the market today.


  • My preferred variation of this is to make it an open question that leaves them in the position of authority, and assumes that they made a deliberate decision.

    For example, instead of “Why aren’t you using StandardLib that does 90% of this?”, I would try “Could this be achieved with StandardLib? Seems like it would cover 90% of this”.



  • I switched from Zsh to Nushell almost two years ago and I have never looked back. If you need POSIX compliance, Nushell is a no go. But it sounds like your real problem was just that Zsh was familiar whereas fish was not. Nushell strikes the perfect balance of offering the commands you’re used to but letting everything just make intuitive sense. Plus, its help command is so far above and beyond other shells. I rarely need to open the Nushell docs (even though they’re really good), and I never have to go the community (even though it’s awesome), because I can figure pretty much everything out just from interacting help within the terminal.





  • More specifically, he argued (and the recent and upcoming releases of most major frameworks agree) that rendering most content on the server with islands of client-side interactivity is the future.

    That’s not necessarily a huge revelation, but the big difference from what people have been doing with PHP for decades is the level of integration and simplicity in mixing server-side and client-side code seamlessly so that a dev can choose the appropriate thing in each context and not have to go through a lot of effort when requirements change or scaling becomes an issue. I would say that this represents a new level of maturity in the “modern” web frameworks where devs can choose the right technology for every problem to serve their users best.








  • I think the point is that they don’t want to have to use a full JS framework (which is what HTMX is) for this behavior.

    And this is where HTMX fits in. It’s an elegant and powerful solution to the front-end/back-end split, allowing more of the control logic to operate on the back-end while dynamically loading HTML into their respective places on the front-end.

    But for a tech-luddite like me, this was still a bit too much. All I really want to do is swap page fragments using something like AJAX while sticking to semantically correct HTML.

    EDIT: Put another way, if you look at HTMX’s "motivation"s:

    motivation

    • Why should only <a> & <form> be able to make HTTP requests?
    • Why should only click & submit events trigger them?
    • Why should only GET & POST methods be available?
    • Why should you only be able to replace the entire screen?

    By removing these constraints, htmx completes HTML as a hypertext

    It seems the author only cares about the final bullet, and thinks the first three are reasonable/acceptable limitations.







  • Ah ok I think I get you now. To be clear, fall through is implicit - when the case being fallen through is empty. I forgot that, if you want to execute some statements in one case, and then go to another case, you need gotos. To be fair, I’ve never needed that behavior before.

    I absolutely see your point on break not being the default. It is sad, although I will say I don’t mind a little extra explicitness in code I’m sharing with a large team.


  • I’m not sure I understand your point about fall through having to be explicit, but I agree that switch statements are lacking ergonomics - which makes some sense considering they were added a looooong time ago. Luckily, they added recently the switch expression, which uses pattern matching and behaves more like Rust’s Match expression. It’s still lacking proper exhuastiveness checks for now, but that’s a problem with the core design of composition in C#’s type model and one they are looking to solve (alongside Discriminate Unions in all likelihood).



  • I certainly see where you’re coming from, but I think the designers of C# have done fairly good job evolving the language to balance backwards compatibility, simplicity (in terms of having “only one way” to do things), and the ergonomics expected of modern languages. I think C++ and JS are great comparisons because C++ has at this point added everything and the kitchen sink to it’s language and standard library, whereas C# has gone much more like JS introducing features that evolve the best practices for writing but still feel and read like essentially the same language. For example, primary constructors still look just like regular C#, it’s just a nicer way to define simple POCOs when desired.

    As far as important language features, I think it’s easy to pick on discriminated unions because it seems like C#’s users unanimously want that. However, if you read through proposals and discussions, it’s obvious that there’s a lot of nuance and trade offs in deciding how and what form of discriminated unions should exist in C# (and the designers are very active in working through that nuance and trade off - they said they have a working group that meets weekly to discuss it I believe*). And to be fair, they have introduced a LOT of other important features (like records and the vastly improved pattern matching) in just the last few years. Without those features, discriminated unions wouldn’t be nearly as appealing, and those features are great for the language even without DUs.

    *Edit: Source for my claim is the recent Languages & Runtime Community Standup on the official dotnet YouTube channel. Mads talks about the working group at 21:05, but the discussion of discriminated unions begins at 7:09.