Item — HN Reader

> which might have the HN people who prefer rust to respond with downvotes.

This completely misses the purpose of the downvoting feature, which is not surprising, since upvoting seems no longer to indicate quality or truth of the comment neither.

> rust is this sort of equilibra that the world has reached for, especially security related projects

Which is amazing, since Rust only covers a fraction of safety/security concerns covered by Ada/SPARK. Of course this language has some legacy issues (e.g. the physical separation of interface and body in two separate files; we have better solutions today), but it is still in development and more robust than the C/C++ (and likely Rust) toolchain. And in the age of LLMs, robustness and features of a toolchain should matter more than the language syntax/semantics.

> Rust does seem to be good enough for this use case.

If you compare it to the very recend C++ implementations they are using, I tend to agree. But if you compare it to a much more mature technology like e.g. Ada, I have my doubts.

2 comments

> If you compare it to the very recend C++ implementations they are using, I tend to agree. But if you compare it to a much more mature technology like e.g. Ada, I have my doubts.

I agree with you in the sense that it would've definitely been interesting to read what Andreas thinks of Ada/D and the discussion surrounding it and your overall comment too.

I do wish that anyone from ladybird team/maybe even Andreas if he's on HN (not sure) could respond to the original query if possible.

I remember ladybird had a discord server I once joined, perhaps someone from the community could ask Andreas about it there if possible since It would be genuinely fascinating to read.

Although a point I am worried about is if Ladybird changes the language again let's say after a discussion of using Ada/D. It might be awkward.

> I am worried about is if Ladybird changes the language again

In the time of good LLMs this is likely no longer a show-stopper (as e.g. the specific formating rules in C/C++ since there are good re-formating tools). The question is how long we will need programming languages at all. They were primarily invented because large assembler projects were too challenging for most people. But if all the complicated details can now be delegated to LLMs, strictly speaking, we no longer need programming languages either.

> This completely misses the purpose of the downvoting feature

"Downvote for disagree" has been canonicalized on HN since (nearly) the beginning, by pg himself, back when he used his real-name account to comment. :)

I agree that it has undesirable consequences, but it is fully established.

It's even worse than that. People are all too often willing to "flag for disagree". It's getting to be pretty common to see threads with comments that are [flagged][dead] which don't break the rules in any way, but merely express a view which is unpopular. Sometimes I even agree that it's a stupid position to take up, but that doesn't merit being flagged to death. I always vouch for those comments but it feels like an exercise in futility with so many people using the flag function as a "super fuck you" button.

Personally I would remove the downvote button entierly because apparently it is a lossy projection of an at least three-dimensional vector: agreement, quality, truth. Graying out text so it is no longer readable is a censoring measure not justified in most cases I encounter on HN in the eight years I'm here.