I have a confession to make. I started learning Clojure and Rust because of a not-so-worthy reason: because people told me to.
Wait isn't that following the herd? Is that ok?
I think that's OK (feel free to argue), and here is why. The majority of people developing in Clojure and Rust are senior developers. They have worked with numerous languages in the past, and they have made a conscientious decision to work with those niche languages. Doesn't that mean something - possibly that Rust and Clojure are exceptional?
Signal or noise?
Sure it could all be noise. After all, causal inference is incredibly hard.
There are other data points you can factor in. Developer surveys seem to suggest that those two languages are some of the most beloved.
And the mere fact that Clojure and Rust were created recently (2007, 2010 respectively) is reason to think that the language creators contextualized the programming landscape and address some of the prevailing faults. For example, Rust is marketed as a safe alternative to C++.
Newer is not better
But new things are built with the intention of vastly improving on the older things. And that counts.
Ultimately, I want to ask the crowd if they have considered a similar reason when deciding to learn a niche language.
PS: So as not to inadvertently offend anyone, I'll add these comments. I am not implying that:
- Other languages are less worthy.
- Correlation is causation. But it is a necessary condition (necessary but insufficient).
Warmly,
DH
Top comments (3)
We got excited about Elixir (Erlang) / Phoenix etc.
What could possibly be wrong with learning new things?
Well... It depends on your goals. We could all learn the flute - but if the goal was to cook a dinner for 200, then that might be the wrong way to use the time! But if you have the time, the that's great. A friend (a developer but also mostly a business person) recently rewrote their HTML website in Pug. Why, we asked? They said - "well, I don't know." So, there are cases where learning something - that basically destroys the crawl-ability of HTML - for no real reason, might have been the wrong move... but in your case, do you have some spare time? Because programming is fun! Rust is neat! Isn't Deno built on some rust stuff? Seems like a great things to check out. Doesn't Yehuda Katz like rust? He's nice. Sounds like a great idea. You'll have to tell us if it was a good use of your time - in a year. : )
Has it been a whole year?! Not quite, but I figured I should reply year end.
Thanks for commenting. I really want to check out Elixir too. The reality is that I've been quite pragmatic this year, so I only learned what I needed to for my job: React, Python, Java, etc.
PS: I just checked out your site. Sounds like you're an educator. Do you by chance need any mentors or instructors?
RE: mentors / instructors - Mabye!
We're going to require all instructors to go through our entire core curriculum, but - we may have people pop in and share their career stories, or critique work and do code review and stuff at some point. We'll also be building our courses for more advanced and specific topics later.