{"id":7247,"date":"2024-02-20T18:39:45","date_gmt":"2024-02-21T01:39:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.dresan.com\/blog\/?p=7247"},"modified":"2024-02-19T18:47:09","modified_gmt":"2024-02-20T01:47:09","slug":"twenty-twenty-four-post-fifty-one-worse-than-useless","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/2024\/02\/20\/twenty-twenty-four-post-fifty-one-worse-than-useless\/","title":{"rendered":"[twenty twenty-four post fifty-one]: worse than useless"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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So I recently came across a tutorial for game development that seemed pretty interesting, so I decided to give it a try. The tutorial was in Rust, a new language that I\u2019d been hearing about, and so I thought it would be a good idea to learn that too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I even found an online playground, https:\/\/play.rust-lang.org\/<\/a>, which lets you try out the language in the browser, much like the Go playground: https:\/\/go.dev\/play\/<\/a>. I quickly started trying out some simple functions that I use a lot in a variety of languages \u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2026 and got stuck right away on Rust\u2019s lack of function parameters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s a whole blogpost https:\/\/www.thecodedmessage.com\/posts\/default-params\/<\/a> on why this antifeature is actually, in the minds of \u201cRustians,\u201d is a good thing, but even that admits that the alternatives that the language provides \u201cmight seem worse than useless.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m sorry, I\u2019ve gone through this kind of Stockholm Syndrome thinking before, where users held hostage to the good features of a language start coming up with excuses for its warts. For example, take the Go programming language. Programming Go felt like a breath of fresh air, but it was literally worse than useless for my use case – I had to write the software I wanted in C and then call it from Go. And the language itself had terrible warts from the terrible choices made by the core Go team – at the time I used it, no support for generics, endless proliferating error checks, and worst of all, an overly verbose unit test style which threw out everything we\u2019d learned from Java and Python about how to write tests using semantically meaningful methods like assertIsNotNone or assertIsEmpty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m not saying I\u2019m not going to not learn Rust, nor that I\u2019d never use Go again. Hey, one day I may be a convert! But, based on what I know now, I would never recommend these languages to anyone. My recommendations for programming languages remain the same “Big Three, Plus One”:\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n