alt Hacker News> I don’t like the Rust culture. There’s no better way to put it. Every time I’ve interacted with them or hear how they talk about Rust, I just don’t like it.
I wonder if it's not that different people have entirely different experiences:
If you are outside the rust community, you'll mostly interact in the context of language flame wars, "why don't you just rewrite it in rust", etc. That is, you interact with the (small) part of the rust community that is most likely to want to dismiss other languages and want to brag.
I consider myself in the rust community, on reddit, the rust forum, etc, and I find it extremely well-meaning, inclusive, supportive of beginners, thoughtful, and generally a very pleasant bunch.
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I've had rust developers quite often..tell me that it's immoral to use a language that doesn't have memory safety
I also do not like the Rust culture. I think the core problem is that it is so centered around identity, and this leaks into how the arguments are presented and how "outsiders" are judged. Which your example illustrates.
Rust was ~70% of my last job, and the other Rust engineers there were very competent -- large volumes of high-quality, high-impact code. In my rust community interactions at the time, also interactions with my colleagues, I definitely noticed some unsavory trends. An example pattern is:
me> This [API | language feature | whatever] seems harder to use than it should be.
them> No, it's actually not.
me> Here's irrefutable proof.
them> Well at least you have memory safety.
me> But...you can have memory safety without this thing being a dumpster fire. Wouldn't that be better?
them> <no concessions, Rust is perfect>
After a few conversations like that, I've literally had those same otherwise high-caliber engineers spend days wrestling with the "easy" thing we were quibbling about. I'm sure it's not intentional, but it comes across as religious gaslighting.
And maybe I just interacted with the wrong people at the wrong point in Rust's lifecycle and the community is mostly very positive. I see enough people with experiences like mine though that I'm not willing to believe it's a truly miniscule fraction of the language's discourse.
What would you say is a good starting point for learning Rust? I’ve been curious about it for a while, but coming from a mostly Python, I’m straight up intimidated and fear wasting time trying to learn something I won’t really ever fully be competent in…
It’s like that joke: I admire Jesus Christ, it’s his fan club I really can’t stand.
You can substitute that with Rust and it sums up my feelings. The language is great, the obsession with static typing and memory safety from its fans, as if it’s the panacea to all problems in computing, is obnoxious and smells of inexperience. It’s not a coincidence that Rust these days is baby’s first low level language, so you get a lot of strong, uninformed opinions on software design.
I had a senior dev in my previous team who pushed to write microservices for a web SaaS in rust. We already had some in Go and it worked phenomenal. Easy to learn, write, maintain, effing fast and wonderful tooling around graphQL. His only argument was "Rust is a better language and it's memory safe". That sums up the interactions I have with rust fanboys quite well. No one in the team could do rust, the added headaches around memory safety have no benefit for services like this at all and there's no tooling or hiring benefit as well (quite the opposite I guess). There wasn't a single sensible argument to be made for rust imho. I overruled him on that of course.
I just think it'a visually unappealing language.
You are exactly depicting the problem of the rust culture.
This description sounds like a cult.
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Zealots are a problem in every community, sadly. Rust zealots are in the unfortunate position of having the tiniest bit of objective truth on their side — all else being equal, most C software would indeed benefit from being written in Rust instead. The zealots just don’t understand (or acknowledge) how “all else being equal” does all the heavy lifting.
As somebody who’s fascinated by programming languages in general, I’m quite keen on Zig. I prefer Rust, and disagree with a bunch of things Zig does, but admire the language for trying.