Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48357136

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

I love Rust for what it is, but for most of my projects, I can’t justify the added complexity. Sure, there are a bunch of things I miss from the Rust world when I’m working on large-scale distsys services in Go, but introducing Rust in that space would be a recipe for disaster.

I guess the Go team knows that if they start adding everyone’s favorite Rust features, the language would become unrecognizable. So we’re not getting terser error-handling syntax or enums. Having union types would be nice too.

But I work in platform engineering, so my needs are quite different from someone writing business logic in Go. I understand that having a more expressive syntax is nice when you’re writing complex business code, but in reality, that almost always comes with a complexity/fragility tradeoff. That’s part of the reason no one wants to use Rust to write their business logic, despite it being so much more expressive.

For distsys, programming ergonomics matter far less compared to robustness and introspectability. So the Go runtime with Go syntax is perfect for this. But of course, that’s not true for all use cases.

Sorry for the rant - completely uncalled for. This is a cool project nonetheless :)

I also don’t read the blog spam from prolific writers who pop up here every two days, especially the low-quality ones constantly yapping about AI. So the number of blogs I revisit is a handful, and I have a page on my site listing them [1]. Some of the blogs I’ve listed also have backlinks to my site. It’s super simple and works fairly well for me. Plus there’s rss.

[1]: https://rednafi.com/blogroll/

It might feel performative to some people, but Europe just doesn’t trust the US, and arguably shouldn’t. So it’s not about demonstrating superiority in software, but rather showing that there are alternatives you can choose if you want to.

While it's true that in large companies you typically have much less agency than you think and sometimes have to work on things that don’t resonate with you, large companies also have many different teams you can switch to.

So saying this should be the norm is what people have a problem with. Plus, moving to a different workplace is always an option.

If you decide to collect the paycheck and do the work, that’s okay too. But touting it as the norm and saying everyone should do it is gaslighting.

Sure, in the end we work for these faceless, meat-grinding machines. But more or less, we all have some semblance of autonomy, and I absolutely can choose not to work on a product that people hate. I can switch teams before switching companies.

To some extent, I also just do what leadership asks, keep my mouth shut, and collect paychecks. But whenever that happens, I don’t gaslight myself by writing a post on why it's supposed to be this way.

To me, this seems like someone who is married to their paycheck and would do whatever necessary to protect that.

I struggle to understand why anyone would want to generate code in TypeScript - unless what you're building truly can't be done in Go, Rust, or Kotlin; anything but JS.

I’m not sure how much of an improvement it really is to rewrite something from PHP to TypeScript while claiming security benefits.

Then the engine would find the best way to resolve the graph and fetch the results. You could still add your imperative logic on top of the fetched results, but you don't concern yourself with the minutiae of resilience patterns and how to traverse the dependency graph.

But I intentionally haven't added a comment section to my blog [1]. Mostly because I don't get paid to write there and addressing the comments - even the good ones - requires a ton of energy.

Also, scaling the comment section is a pain. I had disqus integrated into my Hugo site but it became a mess when people started having actual discussion and the section got longer and longer.

If the write ups are any useful, it generally appears here or reddit and I often link back those discussions in the articles. That's good enough for me.

[1]: https://rednafi.com

Also, it'll be hard for them to lure good people to work on that thing. Absolutely no one is getting excited to write, vibe, or maintain Java.

https://norvig.com/21-days.html

Typically, college students and teachers would get $500 dingy laptops from Asus, Acer, and Dell. A decade ago, those machines were fine. My mom used one for 7 years, right until they retired Windows 7.

Then the machines started becoming absolutely useless with Windows 8, 10, and now 11. 8GB machines are barely usable now, with constant Windows updates and all the background telemetry services maxing out the disk all the time.

Sure, people can turn off some of these rogue processes. But my point is - an OS should just disappear from the user’s view and let them work.

I don’t live in my home country and haven’t visited in a long time, but I’ve heard that people are really opting for second-hand MacBook Airs. Now with the MacBook Neo, more people will go that route.

Students are opting for cheap Windows machines and flashing them with Ubuntu to make them usable.

Also, there is no point in asking questions when you know that they just yoloed it and won't be able to answer anything.

We have collectively lost our common sense and reasonable people are doing unreasonable things because there's an immense amount of pressure from the top.

This reminds me of the early Medium days when everyone would write articles on how to make HTTP endpoints or how to use Pandas.

There’s not much skill involved in hauling agents, and you can still do it without losing your expertise in the stuff you actually like to work with.

For me, I work with these tools all the time, and reading these articles hasn’t added anything to my repertoire so far. It gives me the feeling of "bikeshedding about tools instead of actually building something useful with them."

We are collectively addicted to making software that no one wants to use. Even I don’t consistently use half the junk I built with these tools.

Another thing is that everyone yapping about how great AI is isn’t actually showing the tools’ capabilities in building greenfield stuff. In reality, we have to do a lot more brownfield work that’s super boring, and AI isn’t as effective there.