My three IDE’s of choice in order of preference:

1. EMacs: ultimative workhorse which can do many more - especially with org-mode (however, time intensive to configure which is why I used also ChatGPT to get it done)

2. VSCodium: easy to manage almost anything due to its huge number of extensions

3. Vim: don’t know, sometimes I feel the need to work with Vim and it’s many shortcuts

All are free and open source.

1. In my opinion, you’re doing a great job by not enabling downvotes. Every user can see how many votes their comment has, which should be enough for them to gauge how well their comment is received. 👍

2. I haven’t been on Stack Overflow for a long time (around 15 years ago). Back then, I was mostly focused on statistics and programming in R. It’s true that rude responses were rare, especially in the sense that the OP should have known the answer beforehand or could have researched it themselves before asking. But yes, I never saw personal attacks.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you wrote on Reddit, but from what I read, there was nothing even remotely offensive. You simply provided information. Downvoting you for that is just silly.

The downvotes you’re getting here on Lemmy for your comment are equally baseless (current status: 0). It just shows that some people have enough energy to downvote, but not enough to engage in a discussion. Maybe they should save that energy for something more constructive.

Some newspaper forums require identity verification (through paid subscriptions, social media accounts, etc.). These forums are generally much more civil - and we all know why.

I find the concept of downvoting very toxic and discouraging. It can potentially prevent people to express different views, something a discussion and our personal development is thriving on. It can be well seen on Reddit and even on Lemmy, where people with different views get sometimes heavily downvoted. It is something I consider to be close to “cancel culture” - a majority decides not to like your opinion, so it tries to silence you by voting you “out”. I would really love to see that Lemmy removes this feature and just allows to upvote - so you can upvote a comment or not, but you cannot downvote a comment.

I found the article, or better opinion. My bed that it wasn’t a Finn, but an America, Alan Ward. The metaphor is taken from him, while he explains in his article much better than me. Please, see his opinion on page 48-49 in the linked PDF of the current Full Circle issue #215 below:

Full Circle #215

I find his metaphor very apt.

@Flipper, if you just learn from one master, you cannot become a master in the field. As I said above: relying heavily on the compiler, even when this may be the best „teacher“, does not make you - I do not speak about you personally, but you in general, so all programmers - a good programmer. This is my major critic about Rust, while I do also understand its advantages.

Thank you for your explanation and I understand it well, as well the advantage to find bugs quicker (which however does not mean that a safe code cannot be also a bad code). However, I do think that writing safe code without being guided by a compiler is indeed a skill. And the question how safe the code written with the help of the compiler will be is another interesting one. Perhaps we will find out in the future.

In my opinion, Rust is a language dictated by the compiler rather than one that allows you to use your brain, knowledge, and skills to deepen your understanding. Rust is essentially a programming language with training wheels. Unfortunately, the preference to finish tasks quickly is nowadays the mainstream. The understanding of the deeper stuff falls behind.

A related example from real life: bike tyres that have a flat. Less and less people can change the tyres on their own, and even do not understand the construction and characteristics of different tyres, only believing what the vendor in the shop is telling them. Bad surprises then happen.

Alas, when there is no difference between unsafe wrapper in Rust and C, then why learning Rust, if one wants to go for managing the memory manually? Especially when considering the complex way of coding in Rust? Another problem: going the easy way and forgetting the tricky parts - if Rust allows for unsafe code, but it is safer to put it into a « safe » mode, so why I need to take the burden and deal with unsafe code? This will evidently lead to the situation that less and less unsafe blocks will be used, which finally leads to a situation where the programmer forgets the in and outs of manual memory management. You can see it as the principal aim of writing memory safe code, but to me it is also a way of « delearning » by learning. I see here the reason why so many young programmers are opting for Rust, because manually managing the memory in larger projects like in C is a question of knowledge and experience which does not come in one day. I also doubt that following just the compiler is a good approach. I agree totally with your last points though! Coding should mean to have fun and be the same time mentally challenged due to complex algorithms or demand for better code in general.

I like the description by a Finn who said: Rust is like a car with automatic, while in C (or Zig) you need to change the gears. In Rust you literally follow the compiler, which allows many young developers to program at low level, while C demands more time to avoid bugs. It is up to each person what he/she prefers. I would prefer to control myself the stuff and learn the in and outs of memory management.