technom

I don't know if you're talking about panics and abort or about crashes caused by memory safety errors. The latter class is very unlikely in safe rust, other than as rare compiler bugs. Panics and aborts are your call. You can easily write code that doesn't panic or abort.

Have you really used Rust or are you spreading FUD? I have not managed to cause even a single segfault in my 8 years of writing Rust code. Nor have I heard anyone else complaining about it, other than deliberately as proof of concept.

So you can't get a Rust program to segfault without trying really hard. I haven't observed a single segfault in the normal Rust code I wrote in the past 8 years.

That's misinformation. There's no overestimation. The problem is so bad that even the US government advocates the use of memory safe languages (including GC languages).

I have used C and C++. You need laser sharp focus to avoid memory safety errors even after you learn what causes them and how to avoid them. It's significantly easier to write programs in Rust because any lapse in care to avoid memory safety bugs are caught by the compiler.

So are Haskell and Idris (well, if you consider a singing dragon as a person).

Why no Ada or Janet? Or Haskell or Idris?

Have you tried Linux or the BSDs? Having spent a lot of time on Linux and Windows, the former feels like a well oiled machine with many fine tuning screws, while the latter feels like a rusted old trunk that needs a crowbar to get anything done.

Git owes a lot of its popularity to github. Without it, there's a good chance that mercurial would have taken over. In addition, the centralized workflow was what made both git and github popular. It simplified git usage enough to let a lot of novices get started.

I'm in no way a fan of centralization that github represents. But I think a decentralized workflow using git was a lost opportunity. People complain a lot about the git-email workflow. But I see no reason why it couldn't have become as easy as using github if the effort spent on github was spent on git-email tools and user experience.

Python is one of my primary languages (the other one being Rust). But it honestly isn't the easiest language to teach - I'm saying this from experience. There are so many concepts at play - name binding, iterators, generators, exception chains, context managers, decorators, ... . I could go on and on. Teaching becomes hard because any basic question could become a journey into the rabbit hole of python semantics.

Python is, however, a good first language for self learners. (Note: teaching vs learning). Python behaves intuitively. It's designed in such a way that if you guess something about the language, you'll probably be right.

I started from a similar background in school. Learning from books in the library and coding on a sheet of paper. Opportunities to get that in a real computer was hard to come by. Some teachers helped by pitching in to get me a few hours in the school lab. Those who like it start learning well before the resources become available. You don't need to wait till UG to gain those skills.

That said, how often do you see kids these days using a real general purpose computer suitable for coding? Like a desktop or laptop? Not phones, Chromebooks or tablets. In fact, it's bewildering these days to see programming tutorials start with a statement saying that you need such a device. It was a given, back in the day. And the other stories here don't paint a good picture.

I'm yet to hear anyone saying that chatGPT can navigate the complex series of design decisions needed to create a cohesive app (unless of course, it was trained on something exactly the same). Many people report spending an inordinate amount of time rectifying the mistakes these LLMs make. It sounds like a glorified autofill (I haven't used them yet). I shudder to think about the future of the software ecosystem if an entire generation is trained to rely entirely on them to create code.

I forgot that ad and had to look it up. It's pretentious and annoying as hell.