Watch a video on how Actix Web’s drama went down

(This is a direct copy of a comment I posted on a YouTube video mostly because I tend to just repeat these sentiments over and over again)

And… I’m honestly surprised this doesn’t happen more often with the Rust. I’ve tried to read the docs, I’ve tried to talk people in the community. The whole selling point of it is a cult-like “Sunk Cost Fallacy” type notion for how it works. The whole hype of Rust is that it is the best possible language ever — the second coming of Jesus and all that like.

It works as a weird foil for Haskell… which was a language that happened out of accident. Mostly from academics going, “What if my Math-esque-like psuedocode was real code? Just kidding… unless…”. Since Haskell was meant more to document hypothetical constructs in an extremely coherent manner — it has kind of created a scenario where Haskell is… uh… Haskell. I mean, Haskell certainly isn’t Prolog… though not for a lack of trying.

Also compare to Perl — which exists because Larry Wall hated programming in Bash — and was doing a lot of log file searching with grep/sed/awk… so he made his own program to grep/sed/awk in a manner that looks like Bash. Then… Perl just didn’t stop. It should have stopped — but nothing could ever stop it. The only thing that could stop Perl was Perl6.

Then compare further to Python — which exists because Perl existed — and was invented because “$#}%{#$][%^#$!!! those symbols!”… well, not just Perl, but also Forth, Lisp, C, etc. Which Python works well because of all those PEP files. With Python existing mostly as a Hipster computer language — and Python could calm down a little bit with its thick framed glasses that don’t even have lenses in it.

Java exists because the people who made it couldn’t get the rights to control ObjC. ObjC exists because both C and Simula descend from Algol — and it isn’t gay if it is cousins. C# exists because Microsoft was all, “yeah… fuck Java”… and JavaScript exists to write config files in Netscape Navigator that could talk with Java if they wanted to do this. Those are such a cluster fuck that of course they get used regularly.

PHP exists as a hackish way to do server end scripting for web pages that was always meant to be “replaced with something better” — and the whole attitude of it, has been traditionally, “just throw something temporary up — we will replace it with something better later”.

I will say that the Rust community isn’t as bad a Lua’s community. Rust at least is making an effort to fix the other common issues with other compiled languages. Lua seems to actively be working on doing all the issues of other languages but so much worse.

Yes… I do compare and contrast Rust with other languages — as Rust, of all languages, does not exist in a vacuum. It exists purely because there is no vacuum. Which isn’t inherently bad. Hell, most of Perl6’s stronger stuff is made from a similar set of notions.

The biggest issue, mostly when I try to get into Rust… is many of the people in Rust want to think that Rust is already _there_. It really isn’t — and prolly won’t ever be there. I mean, Pascal/Delphi was _there_ at one point. Fortran was _there_ at one point. Algo60 is still kind of there if you regularly read older texts (as it tends to get used as an example code language a lot). Rust hasn’t actually gotten _there_ yet. But the entire community is acting like it already has. Hell, at least with Perl6, they know they have to put in the work to get it eventually there… and shit they are doing the work over there. Well, except the part where the bike shed is the exact wrong colour — be sure to let Larry Wall know how much you need him to fix the very important issue of the bike shed’s distastefully poor colour scheme. So yeah… I’m really surprised these sorts of interactions don’t happen nearly as often.

And before somebody says “but companies use Rust”… companies also use COBOL. Hell, there is still software that makes use of Pascal that hasn’t been ported properly to other stuff. If you want to hack a lot of space junk, Fortran is a wonderful skill to know. Some companies even make use of RedCode. Companies haven’t been found to use Malbolge, Intercal, Unlambda, Whitespace, Piet or Brainfuck. Though, I will note that some companies will use some Fungeoids… though I doubt they have implemented those Fungeoids _intentionally_.So… the fact it gets used professionally in the wild isn’t really a validation… as well… you have to do stuff really correctly to not have it used in the wild.

I dunno… Rust is just getting… into really really weird cultist territory… and yeah, there are things Rust needs to be doing differently.