TIL that #Rust, while amazing, isn't so amazing for quick-and-dirty coding. It's like flying the Concorde for a 1-hour car trip.

@JonYoder There are reasons I often reach for the shell for quick-and-dirty things. But for anything serious, it quickly becomes a problem. In the days of Python 2, it was a good replacement, but with Python 3's inability to correctly handle POSIX filenames, environment variables, and parameters, I wouldn't bother. Rust is actually pretty decent for a lot of quick stuff once you get used to it.

@jgoerzen What kinds of problems have you run into with Python 3?

@JonYoder I wrote a series of articles on this subject culminating in https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10063-the-fundamental-problem-in-python-3 . In short, I was so burned by my effort to port #pygopherd to #Python 3 -- and the utter crappiness and inconsistency of handling non-UTF8 in even the library bundled with Python -- that I consider it unsuitable for any purpose involving filenames, command-line parameters, or environment variables. One lovely tidbit is the zipfile.py tries to decode non-UTF8 sequences as cp437 in ALL cases!

@jgoerzen Wow! Looking forward to reading this.

@JonYoder If you want a coffee with your reading, after that first link, you can check out https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10053-the-incredible-disaster-of-python-3 and https://changelog.complete.org/archives/9938-the-python-unicode-mess . The upshot of it is, as far as I can tell, it is impossible to write cross-platform #Python code that handles filenames correctly on both POSIX and Windows. #Rust gets this right, and Python's attempt to assume the whole world has used #Unicode since the beginning of time is a real pain.

@JonYoder You got me thinking in more detail why I reflexively avoid #Python now, despite the fact that I wrote two large programs (#OfflineIMAP and #pygopherd) in it, and published a book about it. 1/

@JonYoder Avoiding #Python - Besides the absurd inconsistencies in https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10053-the-incredible-disaster-of-python-3 and the extreme difficulty verging on the impossibility of properly handling filenames in POSIX (see https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10063-the-fundamental-problem-in-python-3 and https://changelog.complete.org/archives/9938-the-python-unicode-mess ), there is more that makes me shy away. 2/

@JonYoder It is astonishing to me that #Python still has a Global Interpreter Lock in 2022. https://wiki.python.org/moin/GlobalInterpreterLock Multithreading in Python is mostly a fiction. There are kludges like https://docs.python.org/3/library/multiprocessing.html which use fork, pipes, pickling, and message passing to simulate threads. But there are so many dragons down that path -- performance and platform-specific ones (different things can be pickled on Windows vs. Linux) that it is a poor substitute. 3/