Rebuttals: "Only for systems programming"

rust-lang / rust-marketing

Rust marketing handbook

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Rebuttals: "Only for systems programming" #8

Closed joshtriplett closed 6 years ago

joshtriplett commented 6 years ago

This would cover arguments that other languages are more suitable for "high-level" programming.

sophiajt commented 6 years ago

Seconded. This is a big one I hear a lot. "I don't know if I have a use for Rust" because our current image leans too heavily in the "Rust is a systems language for serious perf".

joshtriplett commented 6 years ago

Exactly; I hear the same.

A few possibilities for responses:

A language doesn't have to have a single special-purpose niche. Just because Rust can go anywhere C can doesn't make it as low-level as C. It's a high-level language that provides access to low-level features. (This perception has developed partly because many high-level languages have partitioned the world into "can I use a high-level language or do I have to use C"; Rust reunifies those.)
Huge library ecosystem for a wide variety of tasks. (Give examples!)
You don't have to choose between performance, safety, and expressiveness; you can have them all. (Related to the slogan of "Rust: fast, reliable, productive—pick three.")

sophiajt commented 6 years ago

Drilling into your second point even more, I think we could pick some examples of source code that read like "high level" languages like JavaScript and then put text with them that say these perform at the same speed as C.

Basically re-enforcing you can choose Rust because you like its expressiveness and just have perf as a nice side effect, if you want.

joshtriplett commented 6 years ago

@jonathandturner That sounds great. Show some things like iterators and show that they compile to the same code as a loop. Show an example of Rayon (s/iter/par_iter/ and get performance). Show how you can easily integrate Rust with Python. Show a less-than-ten-lines example of getting data from a web API in JSON, processing it, and printing useful information.

aturon commented 6 years ago

I'm :+1: on this section, but will keep this PR open for now so we can work together to get some initial bullet points as well.

Centril commented 6 years ago

This is a frequent thing to say in #haskell (freenode) as well when Rust is mentioned; so I think it's a good section to include.