Rust is indeed politically active
17 points by dpk
17 points by dpk
If you write a bug in your Rust program, Rust doesn’t blame you. Rust asks “how could the compiler have spotted that bug”.
This isn’t just a programming language thing. It’s an attitude that any responsible, dedicated user interface designer should be cultivating… always assuming your creation is imperfect, always looking for ways to refine it, and only deviating from “the customer is always right” when the mismatch is down to them being far enough outside the target demographic that optimizing their use-case will pessimize the use-cases of existing users.
(eg. Cutting down a user interface to be friendlier to novices or more suitable to mobile devices in ways which make it less powerful, less efficient, and/or less useful for existing users instead of sticking to what can be achieved by innovating on making the same level of power more approachable. I suppose you could characterize it as “Turn C into Rust, not Scratch”.)
GUIs get all the attention, but both compiler output and language syntax count as user interfaces too.
This article is quite superficial and culture-war coded in a way that is unhelpful.
I think you could make an interesting case for linking the philosophy of PL design (or a general philosophy of technology and tools) to political ideology, but alas, this article does not.
I have a very subtle disagreement there: I think the article is not about what you want.
It is a description of the actual line of thinking of Rust and hits it quite well. It even hits some of the weak points (Rust is actually not a hyper diverse project or not particularly anti-racist, despite popular claims) pretty hard.
It is a description of the actual line of thinking of Rust
Could you clarify, please? Programming languages are human artifacts and don’t have, by themselves, an “actual line of thinking”; perhaps their authors and users do. Are you saying that this explicit political ideology (“memory safety as a power struggle” etc) is representative of the Rust core/std contributors, or of the broader community of Rust users?