"Shallow" reviews

Here's the question: Why write articles like "I spent two days with that tech and here's what I think" and why they seem to be so popular? The "Rust and Go" is a recent example of such an article.

It's not really shallow

I, for one, think it's an excellent article. Though it doesn't say anything that you wouldn't know within the first hour or two of simply researching about those languages on the Web but it expresses a few things remarkably well:

• The title puts forth the idea that those two languages are directly comparable. There are many new languages out there, we seem to live in a sort of a Cambrian explosion of them at the moment. And it's important for an engineer who tries to look outside of the familiar toolset to know at what to look first. The article is not called "Rust and CoffeeScript" or "Clojure and Go", it shows two comparable things that are indeed worth looking at.

• The article doesn't just list language features for the sake of mentioning. It provides useful analogies for people versed in other technologies and highlights the fact that Go and Rust live at the different levels of abstraction: Go is a simpler, less restrictive trust-the-programmer language, Rust is a harder to learn, clever compiler effectively eliminating the whole class of common memory and condition checking errors. It gives me, as a newcomer, a starting point with familiar attributes that I can use to dig deeper.

Education matters

Being an expert in anything makes it harder to appreciate what's useful to people on lower education stages. But they are still important because you can't become an expert without going through all of them. This is why it makes sense to write about something you're currently learning. Not because you know the subject better than anyone else but because you still remember what you didn't know a few days ago.

Move along

It's easy, really. If you've stumbled upon an article that seems obvious to you, congratulate yourself and move along. No need to bitch about it :-).