alt Hacker NewsRust 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.
Its academia. Rust is admirable for having been able interesting programming language research into a mainstream language, but this had the implication of bringing the people who did said research with it into the communities.
It used to be that programming languages were mostly boring and predictable, with maybe questionable semantics (const etc.), but generally that messiness meant they were good enough at getting the job done.
PL research and theory focused on mostly FP, Ocaml family and other functional languages, with things like advanced type inference system, based on postgraduate category theory. These people have fought endless and bitter mental battles with each other, a glimpse of which occasionally leaked to HN. Some paper about a noteworthy discovery in solving a problem incomprehensible to the general public. Some guy complaining about how he tried to educate average programmers about how unsound their programs were, and being taken aback at how these people didn't want to be saved from their own stupidity. Some article complaining about how if every programmer was just 15 IQ points smarter, they'd be all doing FP. But mostly this community kept to themselves.
Thanks to Rust, all these ideas have found purchase in real practical software. Now the academics get to torment themselves with the moral duty of saving the everyman from using less theoretically sound programming languages.
(Disclaimer - I don't hate Rust, I think it's great they made this breakthrough from academia to regular boring programming, but they need to respect the nuance of the world that exists outside the walls of research institutions)