Conversation

Vanessa McHale
@vamchale
took me awhile to articulate why the Rust community irritates me so much, but: stuff like this (claiming the safety of functional code, or claiming to allow you to write functional code) is basically taking credit from the people who actually HAVE worked on functional languages
Quote Tweet
Pascal
@killercup
·
"Rust gives you a choice" (not only true when programming robots) #RustFest
rust gives you a choice either purely functional code that performs as C-like memory sharing code or C-like memory sharing code as safe as purely functional code
5
34
Vanessa McHale
@vamchale
I guess the charitable interpretation is that it’s merely devaluing actual functional languages, but it’s still really bad behavior, and it’s kind of absurd they’re known for having a good community when stuff like this happens.
1
8
Vanessa McHale
@vamchale
It’s arrogant too. “Rust is functional programming btw I am not an expert on functional programming but if I had years of experience I’m sure I’d say the same thing sooo”
4
11
ᵉᵈᵈʸᵇ
@eddyb_r
What I've seen closer to "official" is "being able to write certain things in a «functional style»" (e.g. iterator combinators), in a similar sense to how JS might be referred to as "functional". I would not call Rust an FP language though, it's more that "functional" is ~vague.
1
2
ᵉᵈᵈʸᵇ
@eddyb_r
In terms of "taken from the FP world": traits are typeclasses (with most of the usual implications), and lifetimes are properly parametric (this is important for safety). But exposing many of the low-level details, makes Rust comparatively worse at functional programming.
1
1
ᵉᵈᵈʸᵇ
@eddyb_r
*looks at slides* "purely functional" is a lie Q_Q at most we're "impurely functional" like ML with some sort of region polymorphism, but even that's not a fair comparison. heavy functional inspiration is a far cry from *pure* programming :(
1
2
ᵉᵈᵈʸᵇ
@eddyb_r
(I say that as someone who wants to start implementing a total dependently typed core calculus in Rust. in this scenario Rust is a nicer and safer C, not a replacement for a pure language)
1
1