this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2025
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"Rust's compiler prevents common bugs" So does skill. No offense to you, but, this trope is getting so tiresome. If you like the language then go ahead and use it. What is it with the rust crowd that they have to come acrosslike people trying to convert your religion at your front door?

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[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 5 points 6 hours ago

I can sympathize with some people getting tired of "rewrite it in Rust", especially when it's suggested inappropriately. (Worst I saw was an issue opened on something, maybe a database, I don't remember. Someone said they were a new programmer and wanted to help and only knew a little Rust and that if the project was rewritten in Rust they could help.) But... Rust's compiler being able to do those things is actually super useful and amazing. This is like someone saying they don't need static types because they know the language good enough to not misuse the dynamic types. This is like someone saying they don't need C because they're good at assembly.

While it isn't something as simple as Rust being strictly better than C/C++, it's really silly to say that you being a good developer means you don't need guardrails. Everybody makes mistakes all the time. You're not perfect.

[–] boaratio@lemmy.world 1 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

At my last job I worked in a code base written in C and it needed to be certified to MISRA level A, and even in a language with as many foot guns as C, it's possible to write safe code. You just need to know what you're doing. I know there are tons of Rust zealots out there claiming it'll solve every last problem, but it turns out you just need to be careful.

[–] xav@programming.dev 1 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

it turns out you just need to be careful

Famous last words

[–] hedge_lord@lemmy.world 38 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Unlike you babies I have Personal Responsibility and I write all of my code directly in assembly the way reagan intended. I don't need guard rails and I've never had any issues with it because my Personal Responsibility keeps me safe

[–] Klear@lemmy.world 10 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

Magnetised needle and a steady hand or gtfo

[–] freetopos 7 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

What's actually tiresome is how this keeps happening: https://paulgraham.com/avg.html

[–] qaz@lemmy.world 1 points 12 hours ago
[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 26 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I'd guess it's Rust fan's genuine belief that they have something revolutionary.

“Rust’s compiler prevents common bugs” So does skill. No offense to you, but, this trope is getting so tiresome. If you like the language then go ahead and use it.

If you're that much of a galaxybrain, you should be writing everything directly in opcodes. In reality, nobody is, and we invented languages to help us perform an activity the human brain is very poorly suited to.

This attitude also means that OP stares at their own obvious bugs on a screen all day and then decides they're great, which is level of detachment from reality frightening to me.

[–] LeFantome@programming.dev 19 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (2 children)

Sadly, it is a detachment from reality that is entirely normal, even typical. In all walks of life.

What I still find surprising, even though normal, is how technical people can push actual facts and evidence right out of their world view.

Sure, 70% of the bugs in C++ code bases are memory rated according to multiple sources. So let me aggressively and confidently berate this idiot that says the Rust compiler is doing something useful.

You do not have to use either language to see how idiotic this is. Even if you accept that this guy has “the skill” to make compiler help redundant, he has no point at all unless he thinks that “typical” C++ users have that same level of skill. And, provably and trivially researched—they do not. Being this wrong makes him, as self-evidenced, incompetent by definition.

All he proves in the end is that he is angry (and I guess not a fan of Rust).

“Angry and incompetent” is sadly a much more common trope than the ones he tires off.

[–] squaresinger@lemmy.world 8 points 15 hours ago

There's some weird effects with language-specific bug rates.

In old Java, most uncaught exceptions are NullpointerExceptions, because most other exceptions used to be checked. Can't not catch a checked exception.

So they made Kotlin, where NullpointerExceptions are the only type of checked exceptions. Now there are no unhandled NPEs anymore but now you get tons of other exceptions.

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

Oh yes, it's so very human nature. But damn.

Most coders get the message at least a bit, I think. Other engineers have a reputation for massive egotism, software engineers don't really.

[–] qaz@lemmy.world 1 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Other engineers have a reputation for massive egotism, software engineers don’t really.

That's a joke right?

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

Well, it's possible I'm missing something, or that there's a different reputation actually in the industry, since I'm an amateur. The first stereotypes I think of are unkempt, caffeine-dependent and socially inept.

When I've seen people asking for help online, traditional engineers seem much more likely to flex their credentials and then not actually answer. Although there's definitely software examples as well.

[–] masterspace@lemmy.ca 39 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Skill issue takes are dumb as fuck. It's just republican personal responsibility takes using different language.

Intelligent people focus on producing systemically better outcomes.

[–] Scoopta@programming.dev 26 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

While I do totally see the advantages of rust and agree skill is not a solution given people make mistakes...I do agree a lot of the very vocal rust advocates do act almost religious and it is an annoying turn off.

[–] daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 1 day ago

Do you have time to talk about our lord Rust? Did you know it died for our bugs so we don't have to debug them at run time?

[–] Valmond@lemmy.world 18 points 1 day ago (6 children)

We had the Java guys in year 2000, at least Rust seems to be a decent language.

[–] LeFantome@programming.dev 5 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

Java was created so that teams of intermediate skill programmers could maintain large, long-lived code bases. And it did its job incredibly well.

If that is not your use case (or you do not want to admit that you are such a programmer), it may not be your favourite language.

I always like C# far better. It may be my favourite language overall. It has a bit more headroom and was designed somebody far more skilled. But it was designed to compete directly with Java. So, you know who it was built for.

[–] Valmond@lemmy.world 1 points 16 hours ago

Seems there still are some around!

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[–] mokus@lemmy.blahaj.zone 43 points 1 day ago

“Should I use rust or c++” is the wrong question IMO. The right question is “do I want the code I run, written by thousands or millions of randos, to be written in rust or c++”.

[–] smiletolerantly@awful.systems 126 points 2 days ago (19 children)
  • if your skill is so great that you would never cause the kinds of bugs the rust compiler is designed to prevent, then it will never keep you from compiling, and therefore your complaint is unnecessary and you can happily use rust
  • if you do encounter these error messages, then you are apparently not skilled enough to not use rust, and should use rust

In summary: use rust.

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[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 11 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

The language/compiler restricting some bad practices makes safer code with less skill. Btw, there's also Safe C++

[–] AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space 51 points 2 days ago (3 children)

The human mind has limited capacity for things to pay attention to. If your attention is occupied with tiptoeing around the loaded guns scattered all over the floor, sooner or later you’ll slip and trip over one.

Of course, you’re a virtuoso programmer, so you can pirouette balletically around the floorguns as you deliver brilliantly efficient code. Which is great, until you have an off day, or you get bored of coding, run off to join the circus as a professional knife-juggler and your codebase is inherited by someone of more conventional aptitude.

Programming languages offering to keep track of some of the things programmers need to be aware of has been a boon for maintainability of code and, yes, security. Like type systems: there’s a reason we no longer write assembly language, squeezing multiple things into the bits of a register, unless we’re doing party tricks like demo coding or trying to push very limited systems to their limits.

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[–] ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 12 points 1 day ago (8 children)

The really annoying part is all the people saying that you shouldn't like Rust because actually it's not magically bug free. Yeah, no shit. No one who touched Rust claims it lets you write bug free code. People like Rust because it's modern, fast, has great tooling, great documentation and really nice features like Traits and Algebraic data types. Memory and thread safety is just a bonus.

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[–] IrateAnteater@sh.itjust.works 68 points 2 days ago (7 children)

At this point, I've seen far more people being almost violently anti-rust than I've seen people being weirdly enthusiastic about rust. If Rust people are Jehovah's Witnesses, then a lot of the anti-Rust people are ISIS.

[–] wer2@lemmy.zip 1 points 19 hours ago

Try suggesting people try out a garbage collected language and see how the crabs come to feast. :P

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