When people say things like:

> there was way too much academic interest in language concepts and way too little practical interest in doing work.

They are communicating something real, but perhaps misattributing the root cause.

The purely abstract ‘ideal’ form of software development is unconstrained by business requirements. In this abstraction, perfect software would be created to purely express an idea. Academia allows for this, and to a lesser extent some open source projects.

In the real world, the creation of software must always be subordinate to the goals of the business. The goals are the purpose, and the software is the means.

Languages that are academically interesting, unsurprisingly, attract a greater preponderance of academically minded individuals. Of these, only a percentage have the desire or ability to let go of the pure abstract, and instead focus on the business domain. So it inevitably creates a management challenge; not an insurmountable one, but a challenge.

Hence the simplified ‘these people won’t do the work!’.

If python's painpoints don't bother you enough (or you are already comfortable with all the workarounds,) then I'm not sure Rust will do much for you.

What I like about Rust is ADTs, pattern matching, execution speed. The things that really give me confidence are error handling (right balance between "you can't accidentally ignore errors" of checked exceptions with easy escape hatches for when you want to YOLO,) and the rarity of "looks right, but is subtly wrong in dangerous ways" that I ran into a lot in dynamic languages and more footgun languages.

Compile times suck.

I write scripts in rust as a replacement for bash. Its really quite good at it. Aside from perl, its the only scripting language that can directly make syscalls. Its got great libraries for: parsing, configuration management, and declarative CLIs built right into it.

Sure its a little more verbose than bash one-liners, but if you need any kind of error handling and recovery, its way more effective than bash and doesn't break when you switch platforms (i.e. mac/bsd utility incompatibilities with gnu utilities).

My only complaint would be that dealing with OsString is more difficult than necessary. Way to much of the stdlib encourages programmers to just do "non-utf8 paths don't exist" and panic/ignore when encountering one. (Not a malady exclusive to rust, but I wish they'd gotten it right)

Example I had handy: <https://gist.github.com/webstrand/945c738c5d60ffd7657845a654...>

Different programming languages come with different schools of thought about programming and different communities of practice around programming.

If you take a group of people who are squarely in the enterprise Java school of thought and have them write Rust, the language won't make much of a difference. They will eventually be influenced by the broader Rust community and the Rust philosophy towards programming, but, unless they're already interested in changed approaches, this will be a small, gradual difference. So you'll end up with Enterprise Java™ code, just in Rust.

But if you hire from the Rust community, you will get people who have a fundamentally different set of practices and expectations around programming. They will not only have a stronger grasp of Rust and Rust idioms but will also have explicit knowledge based on Rust (eg Rust-flavored design patterns and programming techniques) and, crucially, tacit knowledge based on Rust (Rust-flavored ways of programming that don't break down into easy-to-explain rules). And, roughly speaking, the same is going to be true for whatever other language you substitute for "Rust".

(I say roughly because there doesn't have to be a 1:1 relationship between programming languages, schools of thought and communities of practice. A single language can have totally different communities—just compare web Python vs data scientist Python—and some communities/schools can span multiple languages. But, as an over-simplified model, seeing a language as a community is not the worst starting point.)

> I genuinely can't understand why you suppose that has to do with the implementation language at all.

Languages that attract novice programmers (JS is an obvious one; PHP was one 20 years ago) have a higher noise to signal ratio than one that attracts intermediate and above programmers.

If you grabbed an average Assembly programmer today, and an average JavaScript programmer today, who do you think is more careful about programming? The one who needs to learn arcane shit to do basic things and then has to compile it in order to test it out, or the one who can open up Chrome's console and console.log("i love boobies")

How many embedded systems programmers suck vs full stack devs? I'm not saying full stack devs are inferior. I'm saying that more inferior coders are attracted to the latter because the barriers to entry are SO much easier to bypass.

whoops. That's right

My gripe is with Rust rewrites. Not uv. Though I very much think uv is overhyped.

Actually uv retains compatibility with the setup.py “insanity,” according to the article:

> uv parses TOML and wheel metadata natively, only spawning Python when it hits a setup.py-only package that has no other option

The article implies that pip also prefers toml and wheel metadata, but has to shell out to parse those, unlike uv.