this post was submitted on 15 May 2024
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Is there a language that anyone would say really does fare well for continued development or is it just that few people enjoy maintaining code? I've maintained some pretty old Go programs I wrote and didn't mind it at all. I've inherited some brand new ones and wanted to rage quit immediately. I've also hated my own code too, so it's not just whether or not I wrote it.
I have found maintainability is vastly more about the abstractions and architecture (modules and cohesive design etc) chosen than it is about the language.
Rust is extremely geared toward maintainability at the cost of other values such as learnability and iteration speed. Whether it's successful is of course somewhat a matter of opinion (at least until we figure out how to do good quantitative studies on software maintainability), and it is of course possible to write brittle Rust code. But it does make a lot of common errors (including ones Go facilitates) hard or impossible to replicate.
It also strongly pushes toward specific types of abstractions and architectural decisions, which is pretty unique among mainstream languages, and is of course a large part of what critics dislike about it (since that's extremely limiting compared to the freedom most languages give you). But the ability for the compiler to influence the high-level design and code organization is a large part of what makes Rust uniquely maintainability-focused, at least in theory.
If I'm going to inherit a large code base to maintain, I'd like Java, C# the most, Python, the least. Go isnt too bad IMO. I've not worked with enough Rust code to really judge it. BTW I like Python but lack of types makes refactoring and discoverability harder