Rust is now a government conspiracy
from onlinepersona@programming.dev to rust@programming.dev on 25 Mar 13:57
https://programming.dev/post/27509486

It’s getting more and more unhinged on LinkedIn.

A linkedin post by a Senior Embedded Engineer stating: Using Rust is a political solution to deskill a generation of coders to replace higher-cost labor with lower The push for Rust isn't just a technical decision - it's a calculated economic strategy. By forcing rewrites of stable systems in a new language, companies effectively reset the clock on developer experience and expertise. When a C/C++ codebase with 30 years of institutional knowledge gets rewritten in Rust, senior developers with decades of experience suddenly compete on more equal footing with juniors who just graduated. Your 15 years of C++ optimization knowledge? Now worth less than a 22-year-old's six months of Rust bootcamp training. This isn't about memory safety - it's about labor costs. Companies call it "modernization" while quietly erasing the premium they'd otherwise pay for experience. The technical arguments serve as perfect cover for what's really happening: deliberately manufacturing a scenario where they can replace $250K senior engineers with $80K juniors. The pattern is familiar to anyone who's watched other industries. Create artificial obsolescence of existing skills, then exploit the resulting chaos to reset salary expectations and eliminate the leverage that comes with specialized knowledge. This is why language transitions always seem to coincide with hiring freezes and "restructuring." It's never been about technical superiority - it's about breaking labor's bargaining power.

#rust

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grob@mstdn.social on 25 Mar 14:02 next collapse

@onlinepersona ah, the time-honored tradition of The Big Rewrite 'cause it's cheap. Where do people get these horseshit ideas?

taladar@sh.itjust.works on 25 Mar 14:17 collapse

Probably from the same spot where they get the idea that languages literally designed within the first few decades of our profession are the pinnacle of technical excellence and can never be surpassed.

busyvar@piaille.fr on 25 Mar 14:09 next collapse

@onlinepersona the master plan to remove old senior devs is ... to train new senior devs.

onlinepersona@programming.dev on 25 Mar 18:14 collapse

That’s a special kind of evil. A purer kind.

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eager_eagle@lemmy.world on 25 Mar 14:15 next collapse

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.

savvywolf@pawb.social on 25 Mar 14:33 next collapse

If moving to another language erases 15 years of experience, you probably don’t have a good grasp on the fundamentals…

ulterno@programming.dev on 25 Mar 16:06 next collapse

Perhaps the LinkedIn user should have considered learning “programming” instead of just C++

sus@programming.dev on 25 Mar 17:27 next collapse

15 years is just about enough to understand how initializing a variable works in C++: randomcat.org/…/initialization.png

onlinepersona@programming.dev on 25 Mar 18:11 collapse

ey yo, wtf? is that a meme image?

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sus@programming.dev on 25 Mar 18:23 next collapse

no it’s real with references to the C++ standard (I think). they also have a big m4 macro(?) for generating the flowchart

Aux@feddit.uk on 27 Mar 10:40 collapse

C++ is a meme.

jimmy90@lemmy.world on 26 Mar 06:44 collapse

shh, Rust Is the New World Order

entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org on 25 Mar 14:46 next collapse

Anti-Rust crusaders: “C is easy actually and Rust is pointlessly annoying and hard to learn”

Also anti-Rust crusaders:

qprimed@lemmy.ml on 25 Mar 15:00 next collapse

ancient amateur C coder here (not even c++). picked up python about 5 years ago (cuz why not?). been playing around with rust for a bit (like it so far). only issue is recoded tools getting released under mit license instead of gpl (cuz, get off my lawn!).

pivot_root@lemmy.world on 25 Mar 16:00 next collapse

get with the times old man. nobody uses rust anymore, its already 10 years old and it takes soooooooooooo long to build. ur not gonna get anywhere unless u can l33tcode in rustscript these days. dinosaur

^/s^

qprimed@lemmy.ml on 25 Mar 16:14 collapse

great grandkids told be brainfuck is the future. are they right?!

sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works on 26 Mar 06:35 next collapse

not even c++

You dodged a bullet. I much prefer writing in C to C++.

qprimed@lemmy.ml on 26 Mar 18:00 collapse

yeah. I took one look at c++ and gagged at what had been done to my beautifully tight, simple language. it just felt like such a bolt-on.

python fit neatly into a void. then came rust. that got me interested again.

umbrella@lemmy.ml on 27 Mar 08:42 collapse

nah, keep on, gpl is superior.

Shanmugha@lemmy.world on 26 Mar 13:18 collapse

Disclaimer: the damn screenshot just won’t load for me, so this is just a personal rant

Rust crusaders: it forces you to write good and safe code! This is superior to other languages!

Me: fucking fuck off, will ya. I need to become competent enough to write good and safe code (meaning think about problems before they happen), not some fucking kindergarten. Rust may be a good language, but the above argument sucks so very much

entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org on 26 Mar 15:44 collapse

The screenshot is a conspiracy-laden ramble about how Rust is being introduced to lower the pay of systems-level SWEs by allowing companies to hire younger people, for the record.

Shanmugha@lemmy.world on 26 Mar 18:51 collapse

Thank you, kind soul.

He. As if language is something that a dev doing systems-level architecture can’t pick up as the need arises. I did have a good laugh

Buelldozer@lemmy.today on 25 Mar 14:55 next collapse

Rust is a conspiracy to bring down wages! Rust is a conspiracy to replace GPL with MIT to gain control of Linux! Rust is a conspiracy to impregnate your dog!

moody@lemmings.world on 25 Mar 16:00 collapse

Hey, you sicko! Stay the hell away from my Linux!

Buelldozer@lemmy.today on 25 Mar 17:10 collapse

Where’s that animooted sickos gif when I need it?

haakon@lemmy.sdf.org on 25 Mar 14:55 next collapse

What the hell is going on with the kerning in that screenshot? My eyes, they bleed.

jlow@beehaw.org on 25 Mar 14:59 next collapse

Yeah, wth is this? It’s so bad at points that it sometimes looks like two words.

heavydust@sh.itjust.works on 25 Mar 15:44 next collapse

Wh atd oyou mean?

Colloidal@programming.dev on 25 Mar 17:51 next collapse

Do we have a c/keming?

caseyweederman@lemmy.ca on 27 Mar 09:06 collapse

If not, please make one, I wanna subscribe

Aux@feddit.uk on 27 Mar 10:40 collapse

Linux is going on.

peregrin5@lemm.ee on 25 Mar 15:00 next collapse

Bruh. Just put Rust on your resume. It’s not like they’ll actually check and you can still Google everything.

Jocarnail@lemmy.world on 25 Mar 15:13 next collapse

I seriously doubt changing language would impact a senior that much…

pivot_root@lemmy.world on 25 Mar 16:10 collapse

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.

barsoap@lemm.ee on 25 Mar 16:56 next collapse

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.

onlinepersona@programming.dev on 25 Mar 18:16 next collapse

You’re writing dangerously bad C or C++ code already.

Shots fired. Must be footgun that went off somewhere.

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Jocarnail@lemmy.world on 25 Mar 17:52 next collapse

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.

sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works on 26 Mar 06:42 collapse

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.

bunitor@lemmy.eco.br on 28 Mar 15:37 collapse

traits aren’t oop. they’re closer to haskell’s typeclasses than anything else

sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works on 28 Mar 23:07 collapse

At its core, OOP is just commingling data and operations, whereas FP is separating data from operations on data. I’m not an expert at Haskell (I cut my FP teeth on Lisp), but that’s essentially what typeclasses look like to me.

The Rust book has a section on OOP, and the main thing to remember is that Rust solves OOP through composition instead of inheritance. Rust doesn’t have inheritance in any meaningful way, but it can solve problems in a similar way as classical OOP.

bunitor@lemmy.eco.br on 29 Mar 01:42 collapse

i would strongly disagree with that characterization of both fp and oo. classifying rust as oo weakens it imo, and the fact that you can easily solve all the problems oo solves in rust, as your linked document shows, is not proof rust is oo, but rather that oo is unnecessary to solve those problems

object orientation is classes done wrong. typeclasses (and traits) are classes done right

sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works on 29 Mar 04:17 collapse

Then how would you define OOP and FP?

Wikipedia claims it supports OOP:

Rust does not enforce a programming paradigm, but was influenced by ideas from functional programming, including immutability, higher-order functions, algebraic data types, and pattern matching. It also supports object-oriented programming via structs, enums, traits, and methods.

I wouldn’t say Rust is an OOP language though, because that absolutely gives the wrong impression since that evokes ideas of classical inheritance as in C++ or Java. But I do very much believe it supports object oriented programming as a paradigm, since you can model things with objects at the core.

That said, I think Rust is best used with less emphasis on OOP, since it’s pretty easy to get into trouble modeling things that way when it comes to lifetimes. I use OOP-style in Rust when it makes sense, and the rest is as close to functional as I can get it.

object orientation is classes done wrong

I think classical inheritance is object oriented programming done wrong. Go had the start of a good idea with composition and interfaces, and I think Rust’s traits + generics improved on it.

sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works on 26 Mar 06:41 next collapse

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.

SatouKazuma@programming.dev on 27 Mar 10:29 next collapse

Junior here. Rust was easy as fuck to learn, honestly. I just want a way out of junior hell with 4 YoE.

bunitor@lemmy.eco.br on 28 Mar 15:35 collapse

rust is leans more towards data oriented design than functional programming imo

Red_October@lemmy.world on 25 Mar 15:43 next collapse

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.

SoftestSapphic@lemmy.world on 25 Mar 16:00 next collapse

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.

onlinepersona@programming.dev on 25 Mar 18:02 next collapse

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?

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tyler@programming.dev on 25 Mar 19:38 collapse

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?

SoftestSapphic@lemmy.world on 25 Mar 20:15 collapse

And somehow it would still be better in everyone’s pockets than exist as a corporate entity.

tyler@programming.dev on 27 Mar 06:55 collapse

Huh? What corporate entity?

stardustsystem@lemmy.world on 25 Mar 16:06 next collapse

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.

sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works on 26 Mar 06:37 collapse

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.

Paragone@programming.dev on 26 Mar 15:30 collapse

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…

_ /\ _

sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works on 26 Mar 23:18 collapse

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.

zygo_histo_morpheus@programming.dev on 25 Mar 17:48 next collapse

The US government recommending memory safe languages has really given people worms in their heads

phoenixz@lemmy.ca on 25 Mar 19:27 collapse

So RFK is now a software developer?

zygo_histo_morpheus@programming.dev on 26 Mar 06:17 collapse

RFK is a C-nile

sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works on 26 Mar 06:48 next collapse

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.

Reddfugee42@lemmy.world on 25 Mar 20:41 next collapse

Now you C++ fuckers know how I felt when you introduced C++ and devalued my COBOL skillset

vii@programming.dev on 26 Mar 09:11 next collapse

This is triggering me really good. Especially the part about seniors competing with juniors. Has this person ever met … people?

Paragone@programming.dev on 26 Mar 15:35 next collapse

www.softpost.org/…/difference-between-rust-and-c

So, this “senior developer” is … braindead & still allowed to be working, then?

_ /\ _

andrewth09@lemmy.world on 26 Mar 13:34 next collapse

Can’t the same thing be said about COBOL developers a few decades ago?

iAvicenna@lemmy.world on 27 Mar 01:03 next collapse

is this the programmers’ version of “Dey took 'er jerbs!! Durka der!!”

SatouKazuma@programming.dev on 27 Mar 10:25 collapse

That’s precisely it.

soulsource@discuss.tchncs.de on 27 Mar 08:27 next collapse

This is so fucking stupid, I can’t even.

For your mental health, have some reasonable arguments about Rust: heise.de/…/Entwicklung-Warum-Rust-die-Antwort-auf…

Since it’s in German, here are the key points of the article (written from memory - the article is quite old, so I might misremember - best read the article yourself):

  • Software development is stuck in a vicious cycle regarding project budgets.
    • Some competitors don’t know better and just budget the “happy path”, that assumes that everything during development goes right.
      • The author uses a term for this which I like a lot: "Hybris of the programmer"
    • Other competitors know better, but still have to lie in order to remain competitive when it comes to prices
    • Therefore almost all software projects end up with a way too low budget
      • So we get buggy software
  • Rust might be a way out of this misery, because
    • it is understood that it takes longer to develop something with Rust
    • but on the flip-side the safety-guarantees rule out a lot of bugs
    • so customers who choose to have their project implemented using Rust are fully aware of the higher costs, but also the higher quality
    • and developers have a well known argument for the higher costs, and also have data that shows how this higher investment will yield a better quality product.
Miaou@jlai.lu on 28 Mar 09:33 collapse

The first point applies to any kind of engineering anyway.

drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 27 Mar 10:42 next collapse

This is such an incredible self-own.

Either:

  • 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++.

  • 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.

xav@programming.dev on 27 Mar 19:30 collapse

Sorry but you’re wrong. It’s both.

Mubelotix@jlai.lu on 27 Mar 10:54 next collapse

I’m almost 22 and I have six years of intensive Rust usage, confirmed by many projects and contributions on Github. Switching to Rust was the best decision I ever made, because this post is partly true

figjam@midwest.social on 27 Mar 11:16 collapse

This has been the nature of technical innovation since forever. Carriage mechanics were replaced by car mechanics and leech farmers were replaced by phlebotamists