>I think we saw a rise of the easy, anything-goes, screw-performance scripting languages. I think the next fashion seems to be in enforcing "correct" coding style. They all have their place.
Having freedom to do what you want is great. Even if you shoot yourself in the foot, you learn your lesson and become a better developer. But as you work with increasing numbers of people, many making the same mistakes you have made, and especially as you end up having to fix their mistakes, you begin to look for a tool that takes away their ability to shoot themselves in the foot. That was one appeal of Rust when I was learning it. It is a pain to fight the compiler over memory, especially coming from a garbage collected background, but it both protected me from myself and protected me from others. At a certain point, at least on large enough group projects, the benefits of that protection outweigh the costs.
- Memory isn't the only resource you need to manage
- Cost matters
I get that you said "whenever possible" but figured I'd list reasons for "not possible" because I think they have a lot of tie in.
In particular. I could imagine that cost is going to be a driving factor in the future for people to want languages like Rust. They want the absolute fastest app runtime with the lowest resource footprint because AWS charges you for the more memory and CPU time you consume. In that case, the most economical thing to do is favoring the fastest to start and run languages available with the smallest amount of resources.
You might be able to technically do the same job with python, but if you can reduce your operation cost by 10x by switching (or starting) with a slimmer languages, why not?
Because GC addresses only one type of resource: memory, but there exist many other types of resources, and handling them correctly is PITA in most GCed languages.
Having freedom to do what you want is great. Even if you shoot yourself in the foot, you learn your lesson and become a better developer. But as you work with increasing numbers of people, many making the same mistakes you have made, and especially as you end up having to fix their mistakes, you begin to look for a tool that takes away their ability to shoot themselves in the foot. That was one appeal of Rust when I was learning it. It is a pain to fight the compiler over memory, especially coming from a garbage collected background, but it both protected me from myself and protected me from others. At a certain point, at least on large enough group projects, the benefits of that protection outweigh the costs.