Rust and Haskell are both extremely well designed. Most of the "top languages" by percentage usage are 20+ years old, so I can't fault them that much for being badly designed, but we should definitely stop using them.
That will never happen, you can't write code like this in Rust:
<!-- Snippet taken from an example of tightly-coupled and unmaintainable code in the Clean Architecture in PHP book[1] -->
<body>
<?php $results = mysql_query('SELECT * FROM customers ORDER BY name'); ?>
<h2>Customers</h2>
<ul>
<?php while ($customer = mysql_fetch_assoc($results)): ?>
<li><?= $customer['name'] ?></li>
<?php endwhile; ?>
</ul>
</body>
Even when the previous code is an abomination, it is absolutely easy to write, this is why languages like PHP are a success, the barrier to entry is definitely low.
The issue comes when the whole industry buys the idea that PHP equals bad code, fail to appreciate the progress the language has had in the last years, fail to appreciate the effort behind projects like Symfony, and become completely foreign to the current best practices.
Why would I ever want to access the database from the presentation layer?
That you cannot write that abomination in rust for me it is a clear advantage, not a disadvantage.
And still I can't understand how can you compare php with rust.
A much more apple to apple comparison would have been with WebSharper.
Because when you're just some guy that wants an answer to the question "how do I get some things from a database into a web page", the answer that starts "Well first go set up a VPS..." and hits "There's this thing called MVC" somewhere in the middle is not something someone who just wants to put a list of things into a web page is going to listen to.
Then a month later that guy that pulled those couple things into a web page is going to go "Hey, maybe I could make a thing to manage those.". And he's going to learn more.
Then a month later he's going to have another bright idea.
And suddenly someone with no programming background is a PHP programmer, and he's putting together ugly but functional websites and everyone is looking and going "MAN PHP IS AN AWFUL LANGUAGE".
There's a huge contingent of people that are maybe moderately technically savvy but are not programmers and are not necessarily interested in deliberately becoming one. These are the people that end up setting up entire businesses in some Lovecraftian Excel sheet. PHP is a language with a learning curve (even for a non-programmer), not a learning cliff, and it makes it really easy for these people.
I don't know if you can do that in Rust (I suspect you can with some effort), but you can certainly do it in Haskell (with slightly different syntax, of course) using a library like Blaze-HTML5.
Your argument is a bit spurious; you're right insofar as you can't write PHP in a language that's not PHP.
That is my point. You require effort in an order of magnitude greater than with PHP in order to achieve the same result, which in the case of a beginner, is the difference between continuing their journey in programming or abandoning the ship.
You are failing to see the big picture and are taking for granted the plethora of initial setup you have to do to begin working with a language like Rust (ex. generating bindings for a database driver written in C if it doesn't exist in cargo), you were just nitpicking in the syntax of the previous example (which BTW, I took care to clarify it was an example of bad code to avoid people not familiar with PHP from getting the wrong idea).
It was my fault to say "you can't" in my previous message (see Atwood's Law), I really meant "it requires too much effort".
>You require effort in an order of magnitude greater than with PHP in order to achieve the same result..
An order of magnitude? Really? I don't think so.
Rust has a library (probably among others) called Horrorshow[1], that exports macros to do html templating.
You claim that it is easy in Php to do html templating. But you miss the fact that it provide zero sanity/security checks while doing so. You need to sanitize every one of those variables before inserting into the html stream.
You see, Php just trades off every bit of sanity and security for a little bit of ease of use. It is that simple.
Yes, an order of magnitude, in PHP we're talking about _minutes_ in Rust we're talking about _hours_ or even _days_ for a beginner programmer, ever tried to install Homebrew in a Mac to name an example? It adds at least a few hours to the equation with its dependency on Xcode unless you already know to just install the command line tools.
Remember that a beginner programmer doesn't always have a background in Computer Science, maybe it's a child, maybe a graphic designer, maybe an elder person or a housewife. Are you really expecting from a person foreign to CS to stop tinkering just because they can't write secure and performant code in your favorite language?
Again, stop taking for granted the initial process setup and all the gotchas that you already know, stop nitpicking in the example of templating and see the big picture: A beginner programmer being able to get instant feedback with little effort in their browser of choice. No initial project or repository set-up, no install for external libraries, no huge development environments (like Xcode or Visual Studio), no build process or compilation, no command line, just an app like WAMP (on Windows) or MAMP (which people accustomed to homebrew avoid) and a browser pointing to http://localhost.
PHP is not a perfect language, but it's neither the abomination people like you describe, too many people judge PHP by its former state of the art and are unaware of the progress it has had in the last years, many of the most popular issues are already gone or at least are too difficult to trigger, to name an example, PHP stopped having register_globals since version 5.4, and PHP 7 added strict type hinting, which throws an error instead of doing unexpected type coercions.
That doesn't mean that PHP is a better choice than properly-designed alternatives, just that it's less worse than before. I agree with the sentiment of using a well-designed language like Rust, but only when a project really requires that degree of security and performance (ex. writing a browser like Servo).
A bakery website written by the kid of a patissier doesn't require that degree of security and performance... Or are you really going to demand that child to use your favorite language just because you despise PHP?
So, you are saying Php is like LEGO and BASIC for web development. I have got no problem with that. Problem is that people using that in a professional setting and uses it to put stuff online.
>A bakery website written by the kid of a patissier doesn't require that degree of security and performance...
I don't think so. Everything that is put online need to be secure. One day it is just a bakery website. Next day it is accepting credit card numbers. And the kid who did this can get employed as a php developer based on this experience, and might build stuff like that for years, with out a clue in the world that they are using a toy language.
When I say "with some effort" I mean "with a bit of initial effort to create a combinator library and zero effort after that". I'm not familiar enough with Rust to be confident of that though. It's certainly the case with Haskell.
> I don't know if you can do that in Rust (I suspect you can with some effort)
You can, using some web framework crates, but PHP is many many years ahead from Rust in making web apps. And I'm not sure if its the right language for the web. You'd probably be fighting with the borrow checker and type system most of the time while the php dev is busy cranking out new features for his/her web app. There is also the problem of compiling huge websites.
Rust looks very complicated to me because there are "lifetimes" and you need to think where to put those single quotes properly. Not a language for a beginner.
Haskell doesn't support OOP if I remember correctly. And it is complicated too.
I never said it was for a beginner, just that it was well designed. Lifetimes are no more complicated than stuff you regularly run into in C++, though.
Python is a great beginner-friendly language, but that doesn't mean it's well-designed in other respects or appropriate for large software projects.
It wouldn't really make sense for Haskell to "support OOP" in the usual since. The OOP paradigm is mostly useful when you have mutability. Another way of looking at it is that you don't need OOP in Haskell because it exposes better ways of interacting with data that aren't present in most OO languages, like ADTs and Typeclasses.
Due to lifetime elision, you rarely need to explicitly write lifetimes. I participated in the last Ludum Dare game competition, my game never used an explicit lifetime.
That said, it is true that Rust has tricky parts. The domain is inherently complex.
