Rant after trying Rust a bit

[Chris via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 23 July 2015 at 20:46:16 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 7/23/2015 2:22 AM, Chris wrote:
>> It's one thing to list "nice features", and it's another thing 
>> to use these
>> features in production code. As a code base grows, the 
>> limitations become more
>> and more obvious. Thus, I would be wary of jumping to 
>> conclusions or hailing new
>> features as game changers, before having tested them 
>> thoroughly in the real
>> world. Only time will tell, if something really scales. I've 
>> learned to wait and
>> see what people with experience report after a year or two of 
>> using a given
>> language.
>
> It is very true that many features look good on paper, and only 
> time and experience reveals the truth. There are a lot of 
> programming features that fail the second clause - like 
> implicit declaration of variables.

What happens next is that users demand that things be changed and 
adapted to reality, which in turn compromises the original idea. 
Then you have a feature soup with dodgy rules. In a way D avoids 
this by providing only the ingredients and not the whole meal.

At the end of the day, it's up to the programmer to make the code 
safe and stable. Time and again language designers try to avoid 
bugs by making the language as rigid and prescriptive as 
possible. "This error couldn't happen in X, because every 
variable is a Y by default!" However, new features give rise to 
new kinds of bugs. Finding a work around for a restriction is 
bound to produce bugs.