FunctionalTV
5 HN recommenders · recommended in 8 months, 2021–2024
37:07 · 45K views · Dec 10, 2018
Bryan Cantrill argues that programming languages and platforms reflect core values, and compares languages through that lens, with Rust as a main example. He draws on his experience with Solaris, DTrace and ZFS.
Cited again and again as the framework for discussing languages in terms of values, and how organizational values shape software quality.
10 comments from Hacker News
As a huge fan of Julia i got to fully agree. Although i would probably not "no longer recommend Julia" but "give huge caveats when mentioning Julia". Organisations (that includes those who maintain programming language) have values Bryan Cantrill has an excellent talk on this this video and i got to agree with the author that correctness (especially correctness under arbitary composability) is not a value that Julia teaches and instills in its users. Some Julia users care about this, some core maintainers do to (as the Pkg3 demonstrates). However there are many invocations (SafeTestSets vs Test) and stumbling blocks. I am aware of no efforts to do formal verification on Julia code. There are no good ways to move certain Run-Time to compile errors. Correctness is not a value of the Julia language. Here is the good thing though, as Bryan demonstrates in his talk, you can hire for values.
There is sparsely little real “engineering” that goes on in the field of “software engineering”, industry wide, in terms of ensuring that our software is reliable and secure. Performance and development velocity seem to take the driver seat always, in a whole lot of software. See also this talk by Bryan Cantrill, “Scale by the Bay 2018: Rust and Other Interesting Things” this video where he talks about software platform values, in the sense of what different programming languages and other things focus on. He also touches on the fact that while higher level layers in the stack might value security it kind of falls apart when the very microcode in our CPUs sacrifices security for performance. This was in a period of time where Spectre [LINK] and Meltdown [LINK] had reared their ugly heads.
Bryan Cantrill explains a very interesting thought about that here: this video I'm sure there are many other factors that play into this (just look at Gary Bernhardt's "WAT" talk), but essentially, I agree that this has to be a big part of the problem. If you've been developing backend systems and asked to hold up robustness and stability guarantees for multiple years and then run into Javascript, you will likely run into situations where you have to make up for its deficiencies in that regard. That doesn't make it a bad language per se -- that's the case with any language in some aspects -- but since JS will be a new language to you, you're much less likely to accept that situation as a given.
No, I'm not. Or at least, not as I see it. How would you describe javascript's values, compared to other languages? This is a great chart / explanation of this kind of thinking from Bryan Cantrill: this video
Bryan Cantrill has an interesting talk that discusses various languages in terms of their values that you might finding interesting: this video