It’s getting more and more unhinged on LinkedIn.
This is such an incredible self-own.
Either:
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C++ is such a horrific language and Rust is so vastly superior that a person with 6 months of experience in Rust can be as productive and valuable as someone with 30 years of experience in C++.
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The person writing the post, and according to them C++ programmers in general, bring virtually nothing to the table other than knowing the syntax and semantics of C++, even after 30 years of programming.
Sorry but you’re wrong. It’s both.
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This really implies a level of competence and understanding among the highest levels of management that I think we all know just isn’t there.
is this the programmers’ version of “Dey took 'er jerbs!! Durka der!!”
That’s precisely it.
This is triggering me really good. Especially the part about seniors competing with juniors. Has this person ever met … people?
The US government recommending memory safe languages has really given people worms in their heads
So RFK is now a software developer?
RFK is a C-nile
Wait, so saving a ton of money by using a language that reduces production bugs is now a bad thing?
I’m a senior sw engineer, and I don’t get paid because I know the vagueries of whatever language we’re using, I get paid because I can lead a team that solves problems. I don’t really care what the language is, but I do care that it’s relatively easy to on-board someone in case we have turnover or something.
I don’t know about you, but I’d rather be highly paid because I’m able to be really productive instead of highly paid because I’m literally the only shot the company has of fixing the bug.
This whole circumstance just reminds me of COBOL. Nowadays you have scant few programmers for it, but the ones who do demand a big salary because it’s such old specialized technology and often they have decades of experience in it. There’s simply less COBOL programmers than there were in the languages heyday, and the ones trying to enter that market nowadays have a huge learning curve ahead of them.
The only reason most of these places that do that though, is because they wrote in COBOL to begin with decades ago, and didn’t want to switch away to something more modern as other languages gained functionality and popularity.
I doubt C is ever going to go the way that COBOL has, it’s too ubiquitous, but it does make one consider the language you write in and how compatible it may be not just with what exists today but what’s going to exist years from the creation of that code.
The only reason most of these places that do that though, is because they wrote in COBOL to begin with decades ago, and didn’t want to switch away to something more modern as other languages gained functionality and popularity.
And it would’ve been much cheaper to rewrite once some years ago than to keep paying people to maintain it.
And in many cases, rewriting something improves the code substantially by finding bugs and fixing architectural issues. Old code doesn’t mean it’s correct, it’s just old, and just today we had a high severity bug from code that was never properly tested and sat unchanged since near the start of the project.
I think that many a time people begin a project coding in a far-far-far too-low level programming-language: they’re solving the wrong problem!
Build your prototype in a high level language, get the model/architecture correct … and THEN begin replacing the slow bits with faster languages…
To me that seems right.
Haskell to begin-with, & when it solves ALL of the problem, correctly … THEN you begin converting stuff to Crab-lang/Rust…
When you’re still bashing 'round, trying to discover the form of the underlying problems in your problem … that’s the wrong time to be doing low-level stuff, to my eyes…
_ /\ _
I get the sentiment, but I think Rust does a pretty decent job even in the prototyping phase. I’ll run snippets in Python or Lua, but that’s mostly for data mangling, like generating code from a data format or preparing test data.
So far it works pretty well.
https://www.softpost.org/rust/difference-between-rust-and-c
So, this “senior developer” is … braindead & still allowed to be working, then?
_ /\ _
I seriously doubt changing language would impact a senior that much…
Rust is one of the harder languages for beginners to learn because of its borrow checker and strict ownership model, but it shouldn’t take more than a month or two for a competent senior to pick up.
It’s going to be deeply unpleasant and seem like a problem if:
- You’re writing dangerously bad C or C++ code already.
- You’ve only ever used Python or JavaScript.
- You try to shoehorn OOP and inheritance into it (Rust idioms are composition and functional programming).
- You refuse to use/learn pattern matching.
- You’re a pedant about “pretty” syntax.
If someone is at a senior level and any of those apply, they probably shouldn’t be at a senior level, though.
Junior here. Rust was easy as fuck to learn, honestly. I just want a way out of junior hell with 4 YoE.
You’re writing dangerously bad C or C++ code already.
Shots fired. Must be footgun that went off somewhere.
You’re a pedant about “pretty” syntax.
Oh I’m definitely whinging about it but it doesn’t make me stop using Rust. People coming from C or especially C++ don’t really have a leg to stand on, though, neither do people coming from ML. It’s Haskell people who get hit hardest.
Can confirm, I’m a senior and I didn’t have much trouble with Rust. After a couple weeks, I was writing useful code. After a month, I generally stopped cussing at the compiler.
I’m still finding odd surprises here and there, but it’s honestly no big deal. I’m about as productive in Rust as I am in Python, which I use at my day job, though I use them for very different domains.
I’m still learning Rust coming from Python and R and honestly point 2 and 3 are not even that bad. Sure I have been bashing my head against some corners, and the lack of OOP was somewhat unexpected, but imho the language really helps you think about what you are doing.
the lack of OOP
Rust absolutely has OOP, that’s what Traits are for. It just doesn’t have classical inheritance, so you structure your patterns a bit differently.
That said, I lean more into functional-inspired style anyway, which tends to work pretty well w/ Rust.
Bruh. Just put Rust on your resume. It’s not like they’ll actually check and you can still Google everything.
Now you C++ fuckers know how I felt when you introduced C++ and devalued my COBOL skillset
Here’s a shocking (/s) observation: it’s about different things for different people.
For seniors like the author, it may be about companies trying to replace them with cheaper professionals. For companies, it may be about renewing the workforce. For product owners / tech leads, it could be about the opportunity of using a rewrite to pick a stack that better aligns with the problems they’re trying to solve. For regulators it may be about its safety features and eliminating entire categories of common issues. For juniors, it may be about choosing a language they actually like working with.
Can’t the same thing be said about COBOL developers a few decades ago?
The US government spending tens of millions of dollars funneling every student into STEM for the last 20 years was absolutely a coordinated attempt to drive down the cost of that labor.
tens of millions of dollars is a pittance to a country the size of the USA… you do realize that’s less than a dollar per person even if you actually spent hundreds of millions, right?
And somehow it would still be better in everyone’s pockets than exist as a corporate entity.
Huh? What corporate entity?
I’m not really up to date on the situation in the US, but aren’t there millions of people with student debt totalling billions? How much did the US government really spend on education per student in today’s value?
Old man yells at cloud. You could make this argument about literally any new technology or skill.
