On: Two Years with Rust

[nicoburns]

I have a maths degree, and I don't think this is at all true for programming.

Lot's of people read books on Object Oriented programming, and write absolutely awful Java Enterprise code. Or they read books on algorithms, and write fantastically efficient code that's completely unreadable.

And what's better than a book of best-practices? A compiler that enforces them.

[antonvs → nicoburns]

I've never met a person with a maths degree who could write professional quality code, unless they also had some sort of other training.

Reading books doesn't automatically fix that, but it can help, just by exposing one to practices that one might not have come across in the kind of work that passes for programming for mathematicians, data scientist, etc.

[nicoburns → antonvs]

> I've never met a person with a maths degree who could write professional quality code,

That's probably fair! There was a programming module in my degree, and it was awful. People were literally rote-memorising whole scripts for the exam (the CS department at my uni didn't do exams, but of course the maths dept did for their programming module).

I actually started programming before the maths degree, and have over 10 years of experience at this point. I'm not saying my code is perfect, but I imagine I'm incorporating many of what you would consider best practices.

I guess reading books can help. I've just not actually met any developers who write high quality code who learnt it from a book. They all learnt it from 1. Practice and experience 2. Colleagues in a work environment 3. Places like HN, which is excellent at exposing you to things you might not otherwise have come across.

I guess my criticism of C++ is over all the little details that can trip you up if you don't have a comprehensive knowledge of the language (undefined behaviour, use after free, etc). Most of them aren't tooo bad on their own, but there are just so many. Most other languages simply don't have these issues.