Post:
If you’re still shipping load‑bearing code in C, C++, Python, or vanilla JavaScript in 2025, you’re gambling with house money and calling it “experience.”
As systems scale, untyped or foot‑gun‑heavy languages don’t just get harder to work with—they hit a complexity cliff. Every new feature is another chance for a runtime type error or a memory bug to land in prod. Now layer LLM‑generated glue code on top of that. More code, more surface area, less anyone truly understands. In that world, “we’ll catch it in tests” is wishful thinking, not a strategy.
We don’t live in 1998 anymore. We have languages that:
- Make whole classes of bugs unrepresentable (Rust, TypeScript)
- Give you memory safety and concurrency sanity by default (Rust, Go)
- Provide static structure that both humans and LLMs can lean on as guardrails, not red tape
At this point, choosing C/C++ for safety‑critical paths, or dynamic languages for the core of a large system, isn’t just “old school.” It’s negligence with better marketing.
Use Rust, Go, or TypeScript for anything that actually matters. Use Python/JS at the edges, for scripts and prototypes.
For production, load‑bearing paths in 2025 and beyond, anything else is you saying, out loud:
“I’m okay with avoidable runtime failures and undefined behavior in my critical systems.”
Are you?
Comment:
Nonsense. If your code has reached the point of unmaintainable complexity, then blame the author, not the language.
Well, the author is to blame for the choice of language.
That is, unless somebody forced their hand. What happens a lot in professional settings. Then it’s that other person to blame.
“Blame the author, not the language”
Says the person who screams they have never worked professionally with a team before.
There is no excuse to not use statically typed, safe languages nowadays. There are languages that let you build faster like Python and Typescript, but faster does not mean safer. Even if your code is flawless it still isn’t safe because all it takes is a single flawed line of code. The more bug vectors you remove the better the language is.
let you build faster like Python
I have to write so much boilerplate code to make sure my objects are of the correct type and have the required attributes! Every time I write an extension for Blender that uses context access, I have to make sure that the context is correct, that the context has the proper accessor attributes (which may not be present in some contexts), that the active datablock is not None, that the active datablock’s data type (with respect to Blender, not Python) is correct, that the active datablock’s data is not None… either all that or let the exception fall through the stack and catch it at the last moment with a bare
exceptand a generic error message.I used to think that static typing was an obstacle. Now I’m burning in the
isinstance/hasattr/getattr/setattrhell.I loved python when I was a junior dev. Now I hate it (except for things like computational math). I have to add debug statements to figure out that someone snuck in the wrong type into the code.
I’m not even going to bother commenting on that train wreck of a post, but I just wanted to mention that I hate the writing style of programming-related LinkedIn posts. They’re just chock-full of sweeping generalizations presented as absolute truth in an extremely patronizing tone.
Why can’t people just say, “In my opinion, X technology is a better fit for Y situation for Z reason,” instead of “Every time you encounter X, you must do Y, otherwise you’re dead wrong.”
It’s just simultaneously so arrogant and also aggressively ignorant. If someone spoke to me like that in real life, I would never want to speak with them again. And these people are broadcasting this shit to their entire professional network.
As an embedded dev, good luck not using C
Not an embedded dev. What’s the Rust situation in the embedded world? Is it ever used?
In my corner of the embedded world, it feels like everyone is practically jumping to integrate Rust. In the sense that vendors which haven’t had to innovate for 10+ years will suddenly publish a Rust API out of the blue. And I’m saying “out of the blue”, but I do also regularly hear from other devs, that they’ve been pestering the vendors to provide a Rust API or even started writing own wrappers for their C APIs.
And while it’s certainly a factor that Rust is good, in my experience they generally just want to get away from C. Even our management is well aware that C is a liability.
I guess, I should add that while I say “jumping”, this is the embedded world where everything moves extremely slowly, so we’re talking about a multi-year jump. In our field, you need to get certifications for your toolchain and code quality, for example, so lots of work is necessary to formalize all of that.
Rust is more of a C++ replacement, no? Rather go with Odin or Zig or C3 for systemic stuff?
Not really. The things where C++ used to shine are usually best done in higher level languages.
Rust is a great C replacement.
Typescript literally doesn’t work though, every large system has some JavaScript interface somewhere and the “any” type propagates through the system because there’s no type safety at runtime
Fuck them both to death
I don’t understand how this would happen. If the any type truly “propagates through the system”, that means you’re passing around a variable of which you say, “I don’t know what this is. You deal with it.” How can you do any meaningful operations on it when you don’t know the type?
You write your typescript code to expect a given type but at the end of the day it’s JavaScript with a type checking compiler so when “'any” gets in through a library or interface somewhere you just get a random “undefined” somewhere when you try to perform an operation with it because it’s just JavaScript at the end of the day
What you’re describing is not really an ‘any’ type in the code but garbage data. No language is going to save you if you read a file expecting a character but it’s actually an int.
Think of it like Haskell’s
castfrom theTypeableclass.Yes, if somebody sends random stuff, you’ll have to handle a failure, or do the equivalent of returning
undefined, what is way easier than properly handling it in TS. What you do from there is up to you.
Don’t use any, and figure out any interfaces or types you don’t have. Have a modocum of discipline to add the compile time safety
JavaScript introduces it, if it uses typescript code you lose all type safety
