
Fire Mario, Not Fire Flowers - robin_reala
http://words.steveklabnik.com/fire-mario-not-fire-flowers
======
llogiq
As I monologued elsewhere:

If C is like playing with knives and C++ is juggling chainsaws, Rust is like
parkour suspended from strings&wearing protective gear. It'll look ridiculous
at times, but you'll be able to do all sorts of cool moves that would
otherwise be damn scary or outright impossible. You'll have so much fun you'll
start trying to do it in other languages, too. And many of us never look back.

Especially when we hear stories about knife players ending up with a bleeding
heart, and that one chainsaw juggler who lost their poodle. At the beginning,
you fear the padding will hinder you, but by now you learned that its clever
design allows you to move as fast as without it. A bit faster, actually, since
you're no longer on the lookout for ledges you might stumble over.

Also you get new improved gear every six weeks, and between this and your
newly built muscles, you start feeling like a super hero. This feeling is
amplified by the community, which simultaneously does awesome feats and is
really humble and open about it (you're by now accustomed to people being good
at concurrency, and get slightly annoyed that your snake-charming friends
insist on doing everything one step at a time).

You also met some folks you wouldn't have expected here, from a number of
dynamic languages, braving the learning curve to descend into low-level
programming, usually singing Rust's praises with unreal sounding benchmark
comparisons.

You start looking with pity at your knive- and chainsaw-wielding friends. You
see both their bruises and denial about said bruises. You'd want to offer them
some of that awesome protective gear (by now you no longer feel the strings,
because they seldom get taut), but you know the answer already. Poor folks.

We are super heroes. We are legion. Join us!

~~~
wyldfire
> If C is like playing with knives and C++ is juggling chainsaws, Rust is like
> parkour suspended from strings&wearing protective gear.

I hereby declare this week "Creative new similes + metaphors for programming
languages week."

------
dceddia
I think his point is sound. His arguments are in line with the ones from Kathy
Sierra's book Badass: focus on making your user awesome, instead of telling
them how awesome your app is. Or in Rust's case, tell users how great they
will be at systems programming when they pick up Rust, instead of technical
details like "memory safety without garbage collection."

