Rant after trying Rust a bit

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 31 July 2015 at 09:08:00 UTC, Ziad Hatahet wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 30, 2015 at 7:19 AM, Chris via Digitalmars-d < 
> digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> wrote:
>
>> My point was that any (new) feature introduces its own 
>> problems... As I said, I'll wait and see what Rust users have 
>> to say after a year or two.
>>
>
> Except, as it was pointed out, this is not a new feature. It 
> has been around in many languages way before Rust.
>
> You don't have to wait a year or two, check what the experience 
> of users of languages such as Scala, Haskell, F#, and OCaml has 
> been like.

It really doesn't mean much if you're talking about functional 
languages, because they're fundamentally different from 
imperative languages in how they're constructed. Almost 
everything in functional languages is an expression, and it works 
fine for them, but the way that code is written in those 
languages is also fundamentally different from how you'd write it 
in C, C++, Java, C#, D, etc. As I understand it, Rust is much 
closer to C++ and friends than a functional language, so how it 
interacts with the rest of the language is going to be quite 
different. That doesn't mean that it won't work just fine, but it 
does mean that the fact that it works fine in functional 
languages doesn't necessarily mean that it'll work well for Rust.

Now, there may be other imperative languages which have something 
similar - be it that all statements are expressions or that a 
larger subset of them are - so there may already be one or more 
languages out there which show that it can work just fine with an 
imperative language, but AFAIK, all of the languages you listed 
are either outright functional languages or lean heavily in that 
direction rather than being imperative. So, I don't think that 
experiences with those languages necessarily says much about how 
well it will work for Rust.

- Jonathan M Davis