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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 18, 2024

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Rust may or may not be the language of the future. Most industries are still firmly in the past. How could they be otherwise? When your engineers each have 30+ years of experience with a language, they’d stick to it even if every new posting demanded Rust. It was hard enough to wean them off Fortran.

Trend-chasing is for the startups. Do you know how many man-hours my coworkers wasted on a bid to start using Docker? I don’t, because at some ambiguous point they pivoted to Kubernetes. I can’t even tell if that panned out, because the whole R+D program got slashed next time a government budget was delayed.

I’m sure there are lean, hungry teams who started a project with Rust in mind. They’ll all put it on their resumes. As it bubbles up into the general consciousness, chief engineers will start floating it as a process improvement. Then PMs will decide to bid stuff with Rust in there. If the customer doesn’t shoot them down, maybe then you get some products depending on Rust. But that takes time.

I was under the impression that Rust was a language that plenty of programmers liked, but that there are few projects using it, leaving the coders stuck with java or whatever.

Of course, java programmers are probably more plentiful for the foreseeable future than rust programmers, so for projects where the dev costs dominate the runtime costs, sticking to java might actually be correct from a management point of view.