Interesting. By contrast, I wish I had used less Python and more Rust for my company's product because Rust is considerably more productive. We were building gRPC and web services.
I just haven't found it to be the case that developers have a very hard time learning it, but we haven't grown to the point where that would maybe be the case. We also lean heavily into microservices so "oh there's no library in Rust but there's one in Python" is low cost, we can just write a service in Python.
In my experience, Python is one of the least productive programming languages for projects with more than 3 people. If you have a big project, you are going to spend a lot more time reading code than writing it. Python is write-optimized.
By contrast, using Rust makes it easy to force a readable coding style on yourself and others.
Python is not readable to you? The beginner friendly, whitespace-enforcing, almost-like-pseudocode-in-English language - that Python? - is not readable enough, but Rust, where you liberally sprinkle ', {}, !, &, :: or #[] everywhere _is_ readable to you? You must be trolling.
You know what Rust looks like to me? Perl without the dollar signs. There's your write-only language, you just have it backwards.
Being able to understand the syntax and by implication being able to understand a single piece of code in front of your eyes doesn't mean you will understand what it actually does. If you're talking about a small piece of code mainly using well known APIs, maybe you will understand it perfectly. But with code calling custom functions in a big codebase? Even when looking at a simple function call in a class:
- if it calls a function on `self`, where is it actually implemented?
- if you pass arguments, can they be mutated?
- can the function throw an exception?
you can't really answer this questions easily and I would argue answering them in Rust is much easier. Also because tooling for statically typed languages can derive much more than for dynamically typed languages.
Surface syntax is the most subjective aspect of a programming language, but Rust uses just a few symbols in a very consistent way. It's nothing like Perl. The indentation rule is nice for small examples, but it tends to break down in cases that are even slightly complex. Which is why, e.g. Haskell can use semicolons and curly braces as an alternative.
Wait what? Python, if anything, has a reputation for being readable! Perhaps this is more of a criticism of dynamically typed languages in general? As the team grows, adding mypy types can help a lot.
Personally, it's the scoping that drives me nuts more than the weird version of dynamic typing (which is awful, but can be fixed). A lot of "pythonic" syntax is also very python-specific and hard to read if you aren't a python person. There is also the implicit type conversion and the runtime errors for things a linter or a compiler would catch in another language.
If you only work on <1000 line scripts, Python is a blast. If you work on projects with >1M LoC, it gets very hard to keep everything you need in your head if you want to understand code that other people have written.
Absolutely agree. I've wasted hours trying to deduce the data types being passed around in Python when this takes milliseconds in other languages. My steadfast rule: if a team is using Python, I don't join that team.
I think that most of why Rust is popular is just that it's a very modern programming language. It has all the nice things people want and surprisingly little of what they don't. So it's no surprise that for some people it's more productive.
But the article pretty clearly outlined a super simple CRUD app. These days that's a problem space so well defined you can practically specify the whole thing in command line flags. Rust really has little to add there. For other stuff, yeah Rust can be super cool.
I can. I work on a ~20k loc Python service as well as a ~10k loc Rust service. The Rust service is only half the size, but the problem space is many times more complex.
Whenever I work on the Python service I feel like I'm working in clay. Like, everything kind of sort of works. It won't at first, but then you just poke at it with a stick until it does. In Rust, it works or you're told exactly why it doesn't and then you fix it.
I change a struct and the compiler provides me with a list of places that need updating.
I have many reasons (mypy, type system, testing, venv, python 2), but really the big one is rust's superior type system as well as general tooling (lsp is way better, cargo and clippy are phenomenal).
I've read and written a huge amount of python and rust, also a fan of rust and don't find it particular difficult to read.
As long as there is proper linting, both should be readable.
That being said, python is about the simplest language there is to read.
Of course if you have many times nested and improperly indented list comprehensions- sure that gets confusing. But that should be fixed with proper linting (black on its own should do it)
Curious about the examples you've seen that were difficult to parse!
I just haven't found it to be the case that developers have a very hard time learning it, but we haven't grown to the point where that would maybe be the case. We also lean heavily into microservices so "oh there's no library in Rust but there's one in Python" is low cost, we can just write a service in Python.