Comment by zahlman
19 hours ago
> having relatively curious, meticulous, detail-oriented people on hand who were interested in solving hard problems.... Had we built those projects with JavaScript or Python I suspect the outcomes would have been worse for reasons apart from the language choice.
I genuinely can't understand why you suppose that has to do with the implementation language at all.
Different programming languages come with different schools of thought about programming and different communities of practice around programming.
If you take a group of people who are squarely in the enterprise Java school of thought and have them write Rust, the language won't make much of a difference. They will eventually be influenced by the broader Rust community and the Rust philosophy towards programming, but, unless they're already interested in changed approaches, this will be a small, gradual difference. So you'll end up with Enterprise Java™ code, just in Rust.
But if you hire from the Rust community, you will get people who have a fundamentally different set of practices and expectations around programming. They will not only have a stronger grasp of Rust and Rust idioms but will also have explicit knowledge based on Rust (eg Rust-flavored design patterns and programming techniques) and, crucially, tacit knowledge based on Rust (Rust-flavored ways of programming that don't break down into easy-to-explain rules). And, roughly speaking, the same is going to be true for whatever other language you substitute for "Rust".
(I say roughly because there doesn't have to be a 1:1 relationship between programming languages, schools of thought and communities of practice. A single language can have totally different communities—just compare web Python vs data scientist Python—and some communities/schools can span multiple languages. But, as an over-simplified model, seeing a language as a community is not the worst starting point.)
> I genuinely can't understand why you suppose that has to do with the implementation language at all.
Languages that attract novice programmers (JS is an obvious one; PHP was one 20 years ago) have a higher noise to signal ratio than one that attracts intermediate and above programmers.
If you grabbed an average Assembly programmer today, and an average JavaScript programmer today, who do you think is more careful about programming? The one who needs to learn arcane shit to do basic things and then has to compile it in order to test it out, or the one who can open up Chrome's console and console.log("i love boobies")
How many embedded systems programmers suck vs full stack devs? I'm not saying full stack devs are inferior. I'm saying that more inferior coders are attracted to the latter because the barriers to entry are SO much easier to bypass.
Sure, but that kind of incompetence is already filtered out (in the https://www.lesswrong.com/w/screening-off-evidence sense) by the task of creating a package installer.
You would think so, yet here I am sitting with a node_modules full of crud placed there by npm, waiting for the next supply chain attack.
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