Moving from Rust to C++

April 1st would be a good time to do Winter's Day if we could pull that off (Winter's Day is a holiday from the Miracleman comics - to celebrate Winter Moran, Miracleman's daughter, by allowing children to run the world for one day per year. In the comic book Miraculous things are possible, so allowing young children to drive fire trucks and so on seems fine...). Maybe in low risk industries we could indulge more of this, so no five year olds driving fire trucks, but there are a lot of jobs adults do that kids wouldn't mess up too badly in a single day if we planned carefully to allow for that.

April Fools isn't really about jokes, it's more about pranks, and pranks are hard to do well. You need a lot of shared in-group context to be able to pull off a prank that's bold enough to be funny, but innocent enough to not be harmful. You don't have that kind of context on the Internet. So instead you end up with some bland yearly variation on "Our software will substitute X for Y, where Y is something we do well and X is widely mocked and disliked. Here's a mock-up. April Fools!"

Which, y'know... eh. Far too predictable to be funny, and kind of disappointing when you're keen for a real update.

It's valuable to have things like that written down every now and then, to give people context about why other people have made the choices they have.

> Moving from Rust to C++. Unusual, but probably interesting.

> Written by Raph Linus? Fuck me, he must have a good reason.

> Oh. It's April 1st. I'm going to go organize my garage.

It should make some kind of statement or call attention to some kind of issue, and the fact that people willingly believed your false report, by itself, should prove your point. That's the purpose.

But, of course, we live in a world where the minute you open your mouth, you're deemed responsible for other people's idiocy, so everyone's just making inane jokes.

i also agree that this is a troll post rather than an actual joke.

That's the real problem here. You can pretty much always get away with a joke -- if it's actually funny.

I’ve seen a project revert from python to php. That would sound like a joke to me if I didn’t know why they did it ;)

But I am glad that “April Fool’s” was in the top comment so I didn’t have to waste tooooo much time being perplexed or mad or… foolish

My personal standard is to flag any low-effort April Fools posts, whether I find them funny or not. At least build something neat as part of the joke. I'm not quite sure what a cool project to support a lame language war joke would have been. Given the zeitgeist, maybe a project that's using LLMs to auto-convert C++ to Rust releasing a mode that does the inverse?

This is post actually feels like almost the worst case. It's a low effort blog post, not funny, just reiterates stale language war talking points, and ends with self-promotion.