This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I have Complaints. In addition to the governance drama, the language has Made Some Tradeoffs.
Compile time remains a pain in the ass, especially on lighter-weight machines. It's strict enough to be obnoxious when writing casual code or projects small enough to hold a coherent mental model around, but not strict enough to avoid unintentional side effects or for crate-internal multithreading to be truly safe. Struct auto-management is one of those things that's really clever and also a giant footgun for portability, consistency, reliability, and just understanding wtf is going on with your data: any time you leave your own application (even to local disk!), any default (non-#[repr(C)]) struct should be treated like a dumb tuple.
((I'm also annoyed that match doesn't support case fallthrough, but I'm probably one of a handful of people on the planet that thinks that's a good idea. For other nitpicks, they missed a perfectly good opportunity to have different symbols for integer and floating-point division.))
Embedded Rust is getting better, but it's still sketchy, even on well-known and well-supported architectures and chips. To be fair, that's one of the hardest environments and the most important for all that no-mutable-shared-state safety that Rust is really trying to enforce; to be less fair, you end up with tutorials for the microcontroller equivalent of hello world that look like this and this.
It's better than Go, and I've dabbled with it; these might not even be things that can be solved (uh, except compile time; it has gotten better). But the treatment of the language as an end-all be-all overlooks a lot of the real-world experience of working with it outside of data centers.
Huh, I have complaints about rust but they're very different.
I haven't used a 'lighter-weight machine' in at least half a decade, and if I had to I'd just compile in the cloud. I just use serde any time a struct leaves memory and that's fine, and when I need threads I just use a very limited and safe abstraction - rust gives you a lot of power but you don't have to use it.
The thing I don't like about rust is ... Rust has a lot of great features, so I end up using it a lot. And for 80% of the code I write, I'm not writing tokio internals or something that needs to get the last 15% of possible performance, so I really do not care about the difference between String and &str, lifetimes, cloning, lambda mutability and capturing, not being able to pass an immutable reference to a state object around while i have a mutable reference to a child of it, there being &s everywhere because half of the methods on containers take references and half take values, ... It just takes mental effort that should be spent elsewhere. I think for people with lower
gthese are bigger problems, but I have a good grasp of all of them. But I'd still much rather not.These are just a bunch of papercuts - they're pretty annoying, but all of the good parts of rust more than compensate for it. I often wish I were using a smaller rust, though. Recently some of the early rust contributors started trying to make a language like that, although the base rates on success are very low and I have some problems with the initial approach.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link