This post started as a rust v go rant but then it became something else. The whole point of high level languages is to make reasoning and implementation easier to accomplish; by extension GSD.

Yesterday I was considering starting a new project and beginning with rust. I made a mental list of some simple goals and then started some lite reading. I was left in a vague state but with some ideas.

• I want to be able to run cross *nix/*BSD/
• weird how split and some other commands are different between OS
• Sure OpenBSD has a rust v1.59 and the latest is v1.64
• Why is Linux chasing rust?
• there was a time when programmers were mentored; now what?
• The OpenBSD devs have a number of best practices; are they embedded in the C flags? C-Flags or Rust?
• It appears that rust compiles rust these days… it’s a basic requirement of many languages… go has been able to do that for a while. But go will compile on OpenBSD without changes. Rust will not.
• rust is this highly protected construct but then the first line of any doc seems to tell us we can turn it off. What’s the point of that?

I’ve written and maintained millions of LOC in assembler. C makes assembler/assembly easier to reason. The early C implementations were just transpilers making it simple to reason but then came optimization and that made the resulting assembly code harder to reason. The original C++ was easy to reason (see Borland C++ for DOS) Later incarnations not so much.

Having spent a great deal of time disassembling byte-code I just do not want to do that anymore.

… in conclusion …

• java is the new COBOL
• rust and go are the new C and C++
• javascript, typescript are the new BASIC
• perl and python are read-only
• literate programming never worked
• low-code and no-code are just macro code generators
• ever heard of JCL
• zig? nim?

What we need is a language and toolchain that we can trust to work on all operating systems forever. Then we need a low-code macro layer on top with some shims to various libraries. We need to be able to split a file in one or two lines of code and we need to be able to generate a report from a database in the same. Change a flag and it’s HTML, csv, tsv etc… I see picol.c and picol.go and I see the answer.