this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2025
515 points (96.4% liked)
Programmer Humor
28016 readers
1457 users here now
Welcome to Programmer Humor!
This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!
For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.
Rules
- Keep content in english
- No advertisements
- Posts must be related to programming or programmer topics
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Programming languages, much like the jackass in the middle, are tools. Different tools are for different things. The right tool for the job can make your day. The wrong tool can make you question your entire career.
So, lisp?
Yes use a lisp family language for everything and you will be enlightened
Tbf racket has a stupid easy gui library.
Yeah, that's the second option.
Right... And the best tool for every job is of course Rust.
Embedded? Rust!
Web Frontend? Rust!
Web Backend? Rust!
idk what orher kinds of programming exist...
Game dev? Just force Rust into it, despite being quite mediocre for the job, there's so many engines written in Rust. ECS is the answer to everything!
"Game dev... Just force Rust into it"
What's wrong with Rust for game dev? It seems similar to C++, and C# which are the dominant languages.
I can see arguments that the current projects have poor approaches, but not that the language itself is ill-suited.
Rust has constant by default, which many don't like in gamedev circles. Yes, compilers don't care and optimize - at the highest optimization setting, otherwise it's marginally slower, and each constant use will just add up.
Other Functional Programming features of Rust makes writing transform functions quite good, until you need to get the results of those functions to be displayed.
Some of the system-level allocation is quite hard with Rust, if not impossible.
The borrow checker is hard to use with games, not to mention it has a big impact on performance.
Object-Oriented Programming is possible through macros, but sometimes you need OOP instead of Entity Component System for more system-level stuff. Sure, ECS is really nice for game systems, but Bevy (an engine written in Rust) uses it for everything.
That is, like, genuinely an advantage, though. At $ DAYJOB, we have a project that spans embedded, backend, web frontend and CLI, and for all of these, Rust is decent.
Like, I can see why a frontend dev would want to use HTML+CSS+JS/TS (rather than HTML+CSS+Rust), mainly because the massive ecosystem of JS components makes you more productive.
But you pretty much won't ever develop a web frontend without an accompanying backend, and then being able to use the same language-expertise, libraries, utility functions and model types, that is also a big boost to productivity, especially if you won't have a dedicated frontend dev anyways.
Realizing that also made me understand why people subject themselves to NodeJS for their backend, which has the same advantage, just with the big ecosystem in the frontend and the small ecosystem in the backend.
Slightly less ironic: I question even this right now (as I have to suffer from endless "hot"-reloading and browser-crashes because of Next.js bloat).
I think the massive ecosystem has fewer high quality libraries than Rust at this point. I use both JS/TS in frontend and Rust (either frontend more as a hobby and backend) extensively, and I very often check the dependencies-source, and even more often rewrite it (unfortunately not in Rust), because of low-quality. And it's sooo slow... the tooling and the frontend (albeit I think that has a very lot to do with next.js... and with how easy it is to make it slow for someone not that experienced or someone not being extremely careful).
Frontend is not yet as matured as JS/TS (whatever matured is, but the count of frontend frameworks is at least a magnitude higher in JS/TS), but I think when I would start a new company I would default to Rust now as frontend indeed, the language itself is for me reason. And I think vanilla-js (or Rust?) is not that much worse (time/effort-wise, sanity etc.) for more complex applications than what the Next.js ecosystem has produced so far.
I seem to remember hearing this story: Back in the 2000s, Google did all their back-end stuff in C++ to make sure it was performant, and when they acquired Youtube they found it was made in Python, slow to run, fast to develop.
Did they change it after the acquisition? Or is python why it's still so freaking slow?
Things is you don't crunch numbers in Python code, you do that in libraries called from Python.
It's a few statements of orchestration and any heavy lifting is encapsulated compiled code.
You don't do tight loops on Python, or if you do you're using it wrong.
This was mostly tongue in cheek, probably not very clear 😅
But yeah, fully agree with you.
Lol @ YouTube being slow
Look at the amount of data that goes through their servers every millisecond. It's ridiculous. All things considered, YouTube is lightning fast.
Maybe the UI isn't as snappy as it could be, but the blame there lies solely on throwing more and more javascript at it to add "features" that end users don't really want.
Aaand artificially slowing down video loading by several seconds, last but not least.
is it tho? Or youtub is just profitable enough to neglect the compute overhead cost?
YouTube is surprisingly not very profitable
Funny how tools are useful. But a person who is a tool is not.
A tool of a person is a fool who is being used by someone else. They might not be useful to you, but to who ever makes the koolaid they're drinking, they're a very good tool.
I think that's the basic idea, but in practice it's used for people who are just generally dumb as well.
Well, when was the last time you looked at a hammer and thought "y'know, you're pretty smart!"
Haha, true. But then again, I've definitely thought that about like, a self-loading rifle or a can opener that way.
Eh, people misuse terms all the time. It shouldn't change what it's meant to mean.
I guess, but neither kind of dashboard catches dash from your horses these days. And forget about all bears being "brown ones". Language evolves.
Evolving is distinctly different than misunderstanding.
Tools are always useful. If its a good thing to (ab)use said tool depends on the tool and if its human or not :p
... And the job for the tool ofc
Exactly. And what is the best tool? The best tool for the job
You mean js
/s
AI! (This message brought to you by The Microsoft Marketing Dept.)
No silly! It's clearly a goat, possibly a whole farm of them
That's just not terribly meaningful, though. Was JavaScript the "best tool" for client-side logic from the death of Flash until the advent of TypeScript? No, it was the only tool.
If it was the only tool it was both the best and the worst by definition.
Flash was awful. I was contracted to un-fuck a custom video player and that experience convinced me that Flash was a dumpster fire that needed to die. Fortunately it did.
You're halfway there.
Yes, it was the best tool, in context
In that context, what was better?
Exactly, the hivemind is strong in this thread
And what is the best tool for the job? The best tool for the job.
Sometimes I just want to use a particular tool, and care less what I'm making with it.
I rarely get this pleasure at work.