IMO choice of language is a design decision. Weighing the pros and cons of a particular language without specifying the use case and project requirements seems ass backwards to me.

To illustrate, consider if we rewrite the title: “Goodbye, Phillips head screwdrivers, I wish you success, but I’m back to flat heads”. Seems silly, doesn’t it?

To be fair though, I imagine this article is written as a reaction to Rust proponents making similar arguments.

> Weighing the pros and cons of a particular language without specifying the use case and project requirements seems ass backwards to me.

Practically every company I talked with about Rust positions named very good reasons to move to it.

N=1 and all, yup, but your opinion is N=1 as well.

There are several very engineering-sound reasons to choose Rust and people are aware of them and are appealing to them when considering it.

> To illustrate, consider if we rewrite the title: “Goodbye, Phillips head screwdrivers, I wish you success, but I’m back to flat heads”. Seems silly, doesn’t it?

you could just as easily say "goodbye allen, but i'm going to torx" or any <insert-things-here> pair. it's only silly if both of the interlocutors happen to agree on the relative merits and that the difference is large enough to be called "silly".

the problem is responses like that amplify the vibes of "well, it's clear that everyone agrees that rust/phillips is just objectively better in all ways". i don't think this discussion would be occurring if that were true.

the right thing is to drill down into the specific trades, and i'm scratching the surface.

oh, you have a greenfield project where manual memory management in C or C++ is burdensome and error prone and it's kicking your butt. perhaps rust might be a good fit?

or perhaps you have a problem where you need to maximize the code interchange with a few million lines of existing code and a large set of existing experienced developers? well, maybe not then...

> I imagine this article is written as a reaction to Rust proponents making similar arguments.

It was even simpler in that they aren't confident of mass adoption. I'm unsure if that's Rust's fault (and honestly, finding any job in this market is a small miracle), but it's a valid factor to not want to be stuck to something forever niche.

Most regular hard-and-fast organizations outside of the SV bubble don't subscribe to this. They will rather tweak design around to match whatever labor pool is available (e.g. Java for most code farms in the past decades).

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