Leancrew (leancrew.com)

What HN people wrote when they linked it

necubiSep 2023
As someone building my startup [0] on Rust (and a fan of the language since ~2014) I don't think this is a very compelling list of points.
> Rust is overhyped
People are excited about Rust! Not sure why this is a reason you _shouldn't_ use the language.
> Rust projects decay
The text doesn't match the headline here; Rust takes backwards compatibility very seriously, and rust code I wrote in 2016 against Rust 1.10 still compiles with Rust 1.72 in 2023.
> Rust is still in beta
Mentions missing async traits, which is legitimately annoying, but the workaround with the async_trait crate works in practice
> The standard library is anemic
This is a tradeoff; big standard libraries become graveyards over time (the classic article on this: https://leancrew.com/all-this/2012/04/where-modules-go-to-die/). How long was Python stuck with a terrible HTTP client because that was the one in the standard library? In Rust we have an incredible, state of the art regex library because it's a separate crate and is allowed to evolve.
> async is hard
Rust's async is hard to get started with; it's a barrier to get over like learning the borrow checker and lifetime system. But once you do I've found it productive and incredibly performant.
--
Overall, I don't think that Rust is the right solution to all problems. Rust makes you think about everything you're doing, the ways in which your programs use resources, and every possible class of errors. This is incredibly useful for writing fast…
JohnHaugelandMar 2022
> This assumes that experience is more important than skills.
No, it doesn't.
It just means that the word "senior" measures experience, not skills, and is frequently misused.
It's fine to prefer a super skilled junior, and smart companies do that all the time. But that doesn't somehow make them senior, and failing to understand the distinction is a significant problem for hiring.
.
> An extremely smart and motivated programmer with 3 years of experience is going to be far above a programmer with average intelligence who phones it in.
My experience in industry and my personal viewpoint is that actually lazy programmers tend to be the best. They don't over-engineer things, and they write their tests, because they know it's better to spend an hour now than five hours next month.
My experience is that smart and motivated people tend to fall on the Knuth side, and not the McIlroy side, of More Shell Less Egg, and this is not what I personally want.
https://leancrew.com/all-this/2011/12/more-shell-less-egg/
Anyway, this is all irrelevant in my opinion. We can hem and haw until the cows come home about who's going to be a good programmer, what styles we prefer, what candidates we prefer, and who knows, maybe one of us will get lucky and say something correct one day. Most people never do. :)
In the meantime, these words formally refer to years of experience, and if you want to focus on their skillset, then read their list of skills, instead. The standard resume has…
coder543Nov 2018
> even just getting a camera feed on Flutter isn't a built-in
Why should it be built-in? That's such a C++ (or C) mindset: that using dependencies is bad, which stems from the difficulty of adding and updating dependencies in the C++ world.
In a language with a rock solid package manager, it's better to have a small core and then pull in what you need. Each of these out-of-core dependencies can have separate lifecycles, which makes it a lot easier for them to be developed and updated, making them higher quality. If breaking changes need to be made, that can easily be done in out-of-core libraries, since existing projects can continue depending on their SemVer-defined compatible version of the dependency ad infinitum, and the project maintainers can continue releasing updates to any SemVer series of the package if they need to backport changes to older versions. When something is in the core, it's very hard to update it while maintaining complete compatibility, and people can only depend on one version of your core library at a time, so there's no room to be flexible. This constricts growth, since the core needs to meet everyone's needs, but it doesn't have the flexibility to do that as the world changes, so it often meets no one's needs.
I don't know how good Dart's package manager is, since I haven't really touched Dart since the very earliest days of the language after it became public, but Rust's package manager is excellent, and having most things out-of-std has been…
FabHKJun 2020
I find your certainty about something you appear to know nothing about mind boggling. Every crash is a deficiency of sorts, so let’s just tell Airbus to build planes that don’t crash! Easy! Let’s just have peace instead of war! Obvious!
It is not sufficient to point out “obvious deficiencies”, one must also point out possible improvements. As other posters (with more patience than I can muster) have pointed out, it is not obvious how to improve this. Putting a lock in place to prevent movement of the lever adds another level of complexity that can itself fail. This is well known and has been extensively studied (a classic paper is No good deed goes unpunished: Case studies of incidents and potential incidents caused by protective systems [0]).
Listen, for example, to this episode of “Undercover Economist” Tim Hartford’s Cautionary Tales [1] (though the example given might itself be problematic [2]).
Airplanes are extraordinarily safe already (look at the amazingly low accident rate, given those fallible, sometimes even negligent and incompetent people that fly them).
Contrary to your facile assertion “There is lots of room for improvement”, there are very few obvious improvements. Change something and you might prevent one accident but enable another one.
As an example: terrorists enter the cockpit. Easy, obvious: lock the door! Ok. Suicidal pilot locks out the other pilot and flies into a mountain. Easy, obvious: unlock the door. GOTO 10. It’s not obvious. These are…
MontyCarloHallMay 2022
>From that perspective, it was entirely reasonable to believe that if a command was so complex that it needed options than it was likely more appropriate for one of the other user interfaces
What would the non-shell interface to commands for text processing pipelining (e.g. sort, cut, grep, etc., all of which absolutely need options to function) have looked like? Some people to this day believe that any text processing more complicated than a simple grep or cut should be done in a stand-alone script written in a domain-specific language (e.g. Perl or awk), rather than piping shell commands to each other.
Personally, I’m glad we got the best of both worlds—having command line tools with a dizzying array of options doesn’t preclude being able to accomplish the same tasks with a more verbose stand-alone script. It is often far faster to write shell pipelines to accomplish fairly involved tasks than to write a stand-alone script. The classic example is the (in)famous McIlroy vs. Knuth: six lines of McIlroy’s shell pipeline accomplished the same thing as dozens of lines of Knuth’s “literate program,” while being equally as understandable [0].
>It’s a shame because McIlroy had a lot of interesting ideas around pipelining audio and graphics that, as far as I know, never materialized.
I would love to hear more about this. The UNIX shell is amazing for pipelining (most) things that are easily represented as text but really falls flat for pipelining everything else.
[0]…
gilchSep 2022
The article starts with some reasonable premises, but the conclusion does not follow.
I think most APL programmers would disagree with this take. Dense code has real advantages, and naming everything has real costs that are hard to see. There's nothing magic about a "line" that suddenly allows for chunking. You have to build a parse tree in your head in any case.
I'm reminded of Doug McIlroy's challenge to Knuth.[1] It's worth a read.
Would you rather have 6 lines of dense shell, or 10 pages of Fabergé egg? I'll take the shell, thanks.
Look at the source code for J (an APL derivative)[2]. It's written in C, but that C was written in APL style by APL programmers. Lines leverage macros and 1–2 character names, making them extremely dense. Some files have a comment on nearly every line. For an average C programmer, this code looks absolutely insane. But it's not. The J devs find this perfectly readable and maintainable. It's clean code! If written with the typical C idioms, it could easily be 10x as long, and therefore harder to maintain. Your first impression is a snap judgement due to a difference of culture. You can learn to read this style with practice. Whatever your current style, that took practice too.
[1]: http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2011/12/more-shell-less-egg/
[2]: https://github.com/jsoftware/jsource

What HN people wrote when they linked it

necubiSep 2023
As someone building my startup [0] on Rust (and a fan of the language since ~2014) I don't think this is a very compelling list of points.
> Rust is overhyped
People are excited about Rust! Not sure why this is a reason you _shouldn't_ use the language.
> Rust projects decay
The text doesn't match the headline here; Rust takes backwards compatibility very seriously, and rust code I wrote in 2016 against Rust 1.10 still compiles with Rust 1.72 in 2023.
> Rust is still in beta
Mentions missing async traits, which is legitimately annoying, but the workaround with the async_trait crate works in practice
> The standard library is anemic
This is a tradeoff; big standard libraries become graveyards over time (the classic article on this: https://leancrew.com/all-this/2012/04/where-modules-go-to-die/). How long was Python stuck with a terrible HTTP client because that was the one in the standard library? In Rust we have an incredible, state of the art regex library because it's a separate crate and is allowed to evolve.
> async is hard
Rust's async is hard to get started with; it's a barrier to get over like learning the borrow checker and lifetime system. But once you do I've found it productive and incredibly performant.
--
Overall, I don't think that Rust is the right solution to all problems. Rust makes you think about everything you're doing, the ways in which your programs use resources, and every possible class of errors. This is incredibly useful for writing fast…
JohnHaugelandMar 2022
> This assumes that experience is more important than skills.
No, it doesn't.
It just means that the word "senior" measures experience, not skills, and is frequently misused.
It's fine to prefer a super skilled junior, and smart companies do that all the time. But that doesn't somehow make them senior, and failing to understand the distinction is a significant problem for hiring.
.
> An extremely smart and motivated programmer with 3 years of experience is going to be far above a programmer with average intelligence who phones it in.
My experience in industry and my personal viewpoint is that actually lazy programmers tend to be the best. They don't over-engineer things, and they write their tests, because they know it's better to spend an hour now than five hours next month.
My experience is that smart and motivated people tend to fall on the Knuth side, and not the McIlroy side, of More Shell Less Egg, and this is not what I personally want.
https://leancrew.com/all-this/2011/12/more-shell-less-egg/
Anyway, this is all irrelevant in my opinion. We can hem and haw until the cows come home about who's going to be a good programmer, what styles we prefer, what candidates we prefer, and who knows, maybe one of us will get lucky and say something correct one day. Most people never do. :)
In the meantime, these words formally refer to years of experience, and if you want to focus on their skillset, then read their list of skills, instead. The standard resume has…
coder543Nov 2018
> even just getting a camera feed on Flutter isn't a built-in
Why should it be built-in? That's such a C++ (or C) mindset: that using dependencies is bad, which stems from the difficulty of adding and updating dependencies in the C++ world.
In a language with a rock solid package manager, it's better to have a small core and then pull in what you need. Each of these out-of-core dependencies can have separate lifecycles, which makes it a lot easier for them to be developed and updated, making them higher quality. If breaking changes need to be made, that can easily be done in out-of-core libraries, since existing projects can continue depending on their SemVer-defined compatible version of the dependency ad infinitum, and the project maintainers can continue releasing updates to any SemVer series of the package if they need to backport changes to older versions. When something is in the core, it's very hard to update it while maintaining complete compatibility, and people can only depend on one version of your core library at a time, so there's no room to be flexible. This constricts growth, since the core needs to meet everyone's needs, but it doesn't have the flexibility to do that as the world changes, so it often meets no one's needs.
I don't know how good Dart's package manager is, since I haven't really touched Dart since the very earliest days of the language after it became public, but Rust's package manager is excellent, and having most things out-of-std has been…
FabHKJun 2020
I find your certainty about something you appear to know nothing about mind boggling. Every crash is a deficiency of sorts, so let’s just tell Airbus to build planes that don’t crash! Easy! Let’s just have peace instead of war! Obvious!
It is not sufficient to point out “obvious deficiencies”, one must also point out possible improvements. As other posters (with more patience than I can muster) have pointed out, it is not obvious how to improve this. Putting a lock in place to prevent movement of the lever adds another level of complexity that can itself fail. This is well known and has been extensively studied (a classic paper is No good deed goes unpunished: Case studies of incidents and potential incidents caused by protective systems [0]).
Listen, for example, to this episode of “Undercover Economist” Tim Hartford’s Cautionary Tales [1] (though the example given might itself be problematic [2]).
Airplanes are extraordinarily safe already (look at the amazingly low accident rate, given those fallible, sometimes even negligent and incompetent people that fly them).
Contrary to your facile assertion “There is lots of room for improvement”, there are very few obvious improvements. Change something and you might prevent one accident but enable another one.
As an example: terrorists enter the cockpit. Easy, obvious: lock the door! Ok. Suicidal pilot locks out the other pilot and flies into a mountain. Easy, obvious: unlock the door. GOTO 10. It’s not obvious. These are…
MontyCarloHallMay 2022
>From that perspective, it was entirely reasonable to believe that if a command was so complex that it needed options than it was likely more appropriate for one of the other user interfaces
What would the non-shell interface to commands for text processing pipelining (e.g. sort, cut, grep, etc., all of which absolutely need options to function) have looked like? Some people to this day believe that any text processing more complicated than a simple grep or cut should be done in a stand-alone script written in a domain-specific language (e.g. Perl or awk), rather than piping shell commands to each other.
Personally, I’m glad we got the best of both worlds—having command line tools with a dizzying array of options doesn’t preclude being able to accomplish the same tasks with a more verbose stand-alone script. It is often far faster to write shell pipelines to accomplish fairly involved tasks than to write a stand-alone script. The classic example is the (in)famous McIlroy vs. Knuth: six lines of McIlroy’s shell pipeline accomplished the same thing as dozens of lines of Knuth’s “literate program,” while being equally as understandable [0].
>It’s a shame because McIlroy had a lot of interesting ideas around pipelining audio and graphics that, as far as I know, never materialized.
I would love to hear more about this. The UNIX shell is amazing for pipelining (most) things that are easily represented as text but really falls flat for pipelining everything else.
[0]…
gilchSep 2022
The article starts with some reasonable premises, but the conclusion does not follow.
I think most APL programmers would disagree with this take. Dense code has real advantages, and naming everything has real costs that are hard to see. There's nothing magic about a "line" that suddenly allows for chunking. You have to build a parse tree in your head in any case.
I'm reminded of Doug McIlroy's challenge to Knuth.[1] It's worth a read.
Would you rather have 6 lines of dense shell, or 10 pages of Fabergé egg? I'll take the shell, thanks.
Look at the source code for J (an APL derivative)[2]. It's written in C, but that C was written in APL style by APL programmers. Lines leverage macros and 1–2 character names, making them extremely dense. Some files have a comment on nearly every line. For an average C programmer, this code looks absolutely insane. But it's not. The J devs find this perfectly readable and maintainable. It's clean code! If written with the typical C idioms, it could easily be 10x as long, and therefore harder to maintain. Your first impression is a snap judgement due to a difference of culture. You can learn to read this style with practice. Whatever your current style, that took practice too.
[1]: http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2011/12/more-shell-less-egg/
[2]: https://github.com/jsoftware/jsource

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What HN people wrote when they linked it

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What HN people wrote when they linked it

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What HN people wrote when they linked it

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Top posts on HN

What HN people wrote when they linked it

Related

Watch a VC use my name to sell a con

The open-plan office is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea

Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day

A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

Facebook is an attack on the open web

RSA is a fragile cryptosystem

fork() can fail

Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000