Cloudflare was crowing that their services were better because “We write a lot of Rust, and we’ve gotten pretty good at it.”

The last outage was in fact partially due to a Rust panic because of some sloppy code.

Yes, these complex systems are way more complex than just which language they use. But Cloudflare is the one who made the oversimplified claim that using Rust would necessarily make their systems better. It’s not so simple.

Every time I consider learning Rust, I am thrown back by how... "janky" the syntax is. It seems to me that we ought to have a system-level language which builds upon the learnings of the past 20+ years. Can someone help me understand this? Why are we pushing forward with a language that has a Perl-esque unreadability...?

Comparison: I often program in Python (and teach it) - and while it has its own syntax warts & frustrations - overall the language has a "pseudocode which compiles" approach, which I appreciate. Similarly, I appreciate what Kotlin has done with Java. Is there a "Kotlin for Rust"? or another high quality system language we ought to be investing in? I genuinely believe that languages ought to start with "newbie friendliness", and would love to hear challenges to that idea.

This frustrates me as well. It is so incredibly common, yet it never passes even basic scrutiny. For one, even in typical modern democracies, the active administration is chosen by like a third of the voting population via a first-pass-the-post system or a close analog of it. It's easy to ignore this when things are going okay, but becomes very uncomfortable all of a sudden when that changes.

And this is to say nothing about how it is people that are chosen, not their individual choices. This is why it irks me when people are interviewed about their knowhow with respect to their political stance. It's basically irrelevant. They need a good read on the person of their choice, not a good read on the choices. If it was about a choice instead of a person, it would be a referendum, not an election.