Comment by skydhash
2 months ago
Such questions may be decided by personal preferences, but their impact can easily be demonstrated. Such impacts are what F. Brooks calls accidental complexity and we generally called technical debt. It's just that, unlike other engineering fields, there are not a lot of physical constraints and the decision space have much more dimensions.
> Such questions may be decided by personal preferences, but their impact can easily be demonstrated.
I really don't think this is true. What was the demonstrated impact of writing Terraform in Go rather than Rust? Would writing Terraform in Rust have resulted in a better product? Would rewriting it now result in a better product? Even among engineers with 15 years experience you're going to get differing answers on this.
The impact is that now, if you want to modify the project in some way, you will need to learn Go. It's like all the codebases in COBOL. Maybe COBOL at that time was the best language for the product, but now, it's not that easy to find someone with the knowledge to maintain the system. As soon as you make a choice, you accept that further down the line, there will be some X cost to keep going in that direction and some Y cost to revert. As a technical lead, more often you need to ensure that X or/and Y don't grow to be enormous.
> The impact is that now, if you want to modify the project in some way, you will need to learn Go.
That's tautologically true, yes, but your claim was
> Either you know the problem domain and can argue about which solution is better and why. Or you don't and what you're doing are experiment to learn the domain.
So, assuming the domain of infrastructure-at-code is mostly known now which is a fair statement -- which is a better choice, Go or Rust, and why? Remember, this is objective fact, not art, so no personal preferences are allowed.
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