&gt; This is a classic example of worse-is-better.<p>C won over Lisp, not because “worse is better”, but because the C&#x27;s advantages over Lisp (performance on cheap machines) were more pronounced than the other way around (“safety” achieved by means of lots of runtime checking - by no means was it possible to statically rule out errors). Lispers fancy their language of choice the pinnacle of computer science, but the falsity of this claim becomes evident under close scrutiny.<p>&gt; Go vs. Rust plays out quite similarly to what worse-is-better would predict.<p>I see a brighter future for Rust in the long run, for the following reasons:<p>First, Go doesn&#x27;t do enough for the programmer: Haskell and Erlang are safer and easier to use, and have much better parallelism and concurrency stories. What kind of silly value proposition is “safer than C” or “less verbose than Java”? Rust offers something genuinely new: half-assed attempts at “better C++s” have existed for a while, but “safer C++s” haven&#x27;t.<p>Second, Rust plays much more nicely with other languages. Rust is no more difficult than C to call from, say, Python. On the other hand, Go seems to  be more of an all-or-nothing proposition: “If you want to use Go libraries, use them from applications written in Go.”