I'm interpreting that as clickbait - just something they added to the title to drive traffic.

hackthebox is essentially a puzzle solving platform where the puzzles are designed to teach you hacking. You're not supposed to hack the platform.

It's not just about learning a language. Given two equivalent languages, writing a project using one or the other is always going to be less work and less of a maintenance burden than writing it using both. A competent manager will take that into account when deciding what tools to use. On top of that, learning a new language has a cost. Of course Rust and JavaScript are not equivalent, but which one is 'better' is highly subjective and dependent on how you measure 'better'. So a manager needs to take that into account. But my fundamental point is that using two languages for a project adds overhead, and learning a language adds overhead, so unless cost (including time) is irrelevant, there must be a compelling reason to choose a dual-language solution* over a single-language solution, and to chose a solution that requires your devs to learn a new language over one that does not. Not to mention switching platforms has a massive cost if your project is already mature. Even if you're creating a new project, if your team already knows JavaScript and doesn't have any particular objection to Electron, there's no compelling reason.

If there is a good reason to learn a language then people will.

Sure. Except in my experience interviewing candidates and from what I've seen online, there are a lot of developers out there who aren't very good. I am not optimistic that the average developer will have an easy time learning a new language. If the "we" in "Is this the electron alternative we've been waiting for" is you and I, that's not a problem. But if OP meant to suggest there will be a large-scale shift away from Electron, then the average developer is quite relevant.

*As someone else pointed out, Dioxus is designed with the intent that you'll right the frontend in Rust, so it's not exactly dual-language like I thought.

Ah, well that’s great for folks who already know or want to learn Rust

I seriously doubt that a dual-language platform is ever going to supplant Electron. Electron has the major advantage that the entire app is written in one language. And according to Stack Overflow's 2023 developer survey, 66% of devs use JavaScript, 45% use Python, 43% use TypeScript, and 12% use Rust. More devs use Java, C#, C++, PHP, and C than Rust. So 2/3 of developers wouldn't have to learn a new language to use Electron, and only a small fraction of the remainder knows Rust.

I was trying to make a point without starting a flamewar that was beside the point. Personally I’d never choose a dynamically typed language for a production system. That being said, Python and Ruby complain if you try to add an array, dict/hashmap, string, or number to another (of a different type) so they’re certainly more sane than JavaScript.

Sure. But in a sane language doing something totally nonsensical like that is an error, and in a statically typed language it’s a compiler error. It doesn’t just silently do weird shit.

I used GitLab’s version of Copilot when it was free and that was net helpful. It predicted for loops and stuff and was close enough, enough of the time that it was net positive. Not enough that I’d actually pay for it…

If I designed the schema it is most certainly going to be structured. Unstructured databases are awful.

Sure, there are worse languages and environments to get stuck with. But I can avoid those jobs. And if I get hired as a SomeLang developer and they force me to work in Java or whatever, it’s time to dust off the resume.

I am aware of that, but Java is the most popular language that runs on the JVM. I don’t specifically dislike other JVM languages, though one of my issues is type erasure and that’s partially a limitation of the JVM.

Obviously OpenJDK is superior to dealing with Oracle's bull. But even more superior (IMO) is simply not using Java. My life has been noticeably more pleasant since I started refusing to touch Java.

You consider calculating the hash of a few bytes to be heavy lifting?

just use await in an async function.

Sure, I'll just put await and async everywhere. Oh wait, I can't. A constructor can't be async so now I need to restructure my code to use async factories instead of constructors. Wonderful...

async/await infecting all of my code, being unable to create a get myField() method that involves a hash calculation. It may be standard to do heavy lifting concurrently, but async hash functions are certainly not standard in any of the languages I've used (which is quite a few).

So you’re arguing that “Object oriented” shouldn’t apply to languages that are oriented around objects?

Of course, but OOP is typically about putting methods on classes, inheritance of behaviour etc.

You’re referring to one subtype of OOP. That may be what most people mean when they say OOP, but that doesn’t make it correct. Object-oriented programming is programming with objects, which does not require inheritance or classes.

It’s hard to distinguish whether a line is wrongly indented or not.

That’s very much not my experience. I use YAML regularly and while I’ve had copy paste indentation errors when I look at the offending line it’s always obvious to me how to fix the indentation. The only indentation thing that’s ever given me trouble is embedding YAML as a string within a file that uses tabs.

If you have a solid idea of your competence, GitLab uses a calculator for salary and they make it public. If you don’t have a solid idea, ask someone who’s worked with you and who will be honest.

BTW someone said mid-level in SF is $200k, so my number may be way out of date.

A competent mid-level developer in San Francisco should be making in the ballpark of $120k salary. There are approximately 50 work weeks in a year (2 weeks of vacation) so 40 hours a week means 2000 hours a year or $60 an hour (for a full time employee). 2x for being a contractor and adjust appropriately for your level of competence/expertise and cost of living.