Defining the Rust 2024 edition

Posted Jan 31, 2024 17:44 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341)
In reply to: Defining the Rust 2024 edition by farnz
Parent article: Defining the Rust 2024 edition

We're agreed by and large. Particularly on stability - managing it - being work. And yes, it's "harder" work than 99.999% of the tech world wants to do. I'd quibble it's /that/ hard though. It can be done. It wasn't that hard in Sun. It was just a /modicum/ of care for daily engineering. An extra topic of review and documentation at points when adding/removing major software components that triggered "architecture review committee" processes.

It was a little bit of sound engineering work, and quite manageable.

Really, where we are today, it's largely a cultural thing - we just don't want stability. Or more precisely, we want stability from everyone else's software, but we don't want to held to that ourselves. We - as an industry - are largely a bunch of degens who just want to slap code around, and not be held responsible much later. Either because we work in some big-walled-garden tech corp, and all that matters is throwing enough code around to get past the next performance review; or because we work somewhere where managers are putting pressure on you to get that next hacky-bug-fix or half-arsed-feature-update shipped to the customers, so that you can move onto the next hacky-bug-fix or half-arsed-feature-update.

Sorry... I've become very cynical. But then, I've been watching some of the videos of testimony from the UK Post Office scandal, particularly the software engineer describing the code issues and practices and.. I really am not being cynical, we really are just a completely degenerate industry.

Defining the Rust 2024 edition

Posted Feb 1, 2024 10:59 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

See also a subset of the fuss around the EU's Cyber Resilience Act; not the people talking to MEPs and national Commissioners about getting the details right (e.g. ensuring that I can't be held liable if you use my software for a purpose I did not advertise it as suitable for), but the people arguing that any form of liability for defects in software will destroy the software industry completely. In effect, they're saying that the software industry (including embedded) cannot exist if software vendors can be held liable for faults in the software they sell.

Defining the Rust 2024 edition

Posted Feb 1, 2024 16:09 UTC (Thu) by Hattifnattar (subscriber, #93737) [Link]

It may be just the fact that a lot more people joined the ranks of programmers.

Early on, programming was an elite undertaking, with people practicing it having a mindset closer to scientists. It was elite job, commanded elite compensation (not necessary monetary, esteem too). The "industry" also had been largely driven by people with more-or-less engineer or scientist mindset.

Now software is a real and huge industry, programmer work is commoditized, the whole thing is more and more run by people with "financist" and/or "bureaucrat" mindset, "buccaneer" in the best case.

There are still "islands of quality" in this mess, mostly dealing with foundations. But they cannot completely isolate themselves from the overall dynamics. However, understanding it can can help to draw some boundaries and do better in specific areas/projects etc.