It was right then, but it's kind of dated and misses an evolutionary lesson: beautiful code isn't enough, it has to be safe, beautiful, maintainable, productive, understandable, and resource efficient.

Ruby is still great for throwing something together fast and maintaining it until it runs into scale problems. It added gradual typing with sorbet and RBS.

Crystal is a neat typed, compiled Ruby-alike but it's buggy.

Rust hits more of these but it's ugly. Uglier than Python and approaches C++-level eyebleed. Rust generics aren't as flexible as they could be because type constraints don't have union and specialization is painful. Tag structs are laborious. Go hits more of these except it's not as flexible and not quite as safe as Rust. Rust makes enormous binaries and compiles slow and the cargo index download is glacial, I'm surprised they don't have an "sccache" for it. Go is easy to learn but then the capability of it plateaus. Go compiles and tests insanely fast.

Rust should rebase its type system to have union types, i.e., foo: i32 | f32. Also, more granular and specialized type constraints (negation, union) on generic trait parameters.

Elixir (on erlang) can be productive. It's gorgeous, it's fast, it's powerful, and fairly expressive.

Haskell and Idris are beautiful and powerful, but inaccessible to most software engineers.

Pony is beautiful, productive, extremely safe, and fast.

Zig, Nim, Kotlin and friends are all moving in the right general directions. Swift is alright too.

    > Rust makes enormous binaries

Rust binaries are optimized to be fast (by default, fast != small), this [0] explains pretty well why, and min-sized also has many optimizations [1].

    > and compiles slow

You can have a very slow compiler with all the optimizations and safety checks, or a fast one which doesn't. This however doesn't mean there is no room for improvement.

One thing that can definitely improved on is how cargo manages dependencies, I am tired of each of my project's /target directory using >2GB of disk space, there at least should be some kind of opt-in global cache.

I am also worried about dependencies going in the same direction as the JS ecosystem, many of my projects only have 3-5 top level dependencies, but I end up downloading hundreds. A few are only compile-time, but this makes auditing very difficult and does make compile times a lot longer.

[0]: https://lifthrasiir.github.io/rustlog/why-is-a-rust-executab... [1]: https://github.com/johnthagen/min-sized-rust