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I remember I stopped frequenting /r/programming when it became this weird Haskell echo chamber. It was a bubble where a small but vocal faction inside the commu

I remember I stopped frequenting /r/programming when it became this weird Haskell echo chamber. It was a bubble where a small but vocal faction inside the community seemed to over react to any criticism. They methodically and tirelessly responded to every comment with an endless litany of "facts" showing how Haskell could do anything from os kernels to game programming. They touted every industry mention of Haskell use and demanded evidential proof for any claim Haskell might not be suited for every situation. It reminds me of the Sea Lion comic[1]. I'm not sure if that faction still holds as much sway today. I get the same feeling on Hacker News about Rust. There is a point where well-meaning evangelism does more harm than good. I sometimes get the feeling people spend more time writing defences of these languages than they spend time writing programs in them. 1. http://wondermark.com/c/2014-09-19-1062sea.png http://wondermark.com/c/2014-09-19-1062sea.png

rapsey 9y ago
> I sometimes get the feeling people spend more time writing defences of these languages than they spend time writing programs in them. Programmers love language wars.
- srcmap 9y ago
  > Programmers love language wars Programming Language Advocates love language wars Most programmers just like to be aware of ALL the PROs and CONs of the languages and choose the right one for the task at hand.
- Nomentatus 9y ago
  In WWII it was famously true that fighter pilots would fiercely argue for the absolute superiority of whatever plane they had been flying for a few months. For example, Thunderbolt pilots hated being moving to Mustangs (etc) - even though to our eyes the Mustang is obviously a superior plane. Once your instincts adapt to something intimately (and programming languages require that); that's what feels right. You'll argue vociferously against a change and use what are objective reasons. (The Thunderbolt could dive faster, it was a brick.) Of course, in the United States Army Air Force, you still had to switch. The old hands usually remain convinced of the superiority of what they know, and irritated by Young Turks telling them something else, nicely or not. Because the Young Turks can't be right. But they are, often.
simias 9y ago
I agree. It makes the community looks childish and inexperienced by association. I think I recall reading somewhere on Rust's website that telling project maintainers to switch to Rust was frowned upon, however I can't find it right now. Sometimes I feel like it should be written in a 20pt font on the home page. Or maybe written in blinking letters every time you run rustup. I always feel it's very presumptuous and somewhat disrespectful to second guess the devs of a project, in particular if you're not a big contributor yourself. Pay your dues. These messages are effectively not a whole lot more useful or insightful than saying "Rust rulez, C droolz" or "have you considered indenting with spaces instead of tabs?".
- steveklabnik 9y ago
  To be clear, you can take it from me: yes, don't go tell people to re-write things in Rust. Agree 100% that it's presumptuous and disrespectful. At the same time, I don't see it actually happening as much as people say that it happens. Maybe I just don't see those things. If I did, I'd tell them to cut it out.
- sgift 9y ago
  People have told me for the longest time that Java is a shitty language I shouldn't be using. Most of those people said C++ would be a far better idea without even bothering to show any reason why C++ would be more suited besides "Java is slow, huahuaha, it is shitty, huahahaha". So, I have to admit I take a bit of a pleasure of seeing those people getting challenged on their presumption that C++ is the greatest language on earth. Language advocacy is far older than Rust. And many language advocates are far more obnoxious than what I read on HN with regard to Rust. I actually have the feeling that the C++ crowd is just a bit sad that the usual defense of "well, yeah, other languages do those things better, but the code they produce is far too slow for our problem, so they're useless!" doesn't cut it anymore.
  - mschuster91 9y ago
    > People have told me for the longest time that Java is a shitty language I shouldn't be using. Java is a great language in theory, the problem with Java is that people have evolved to use layers upon layers upon even more layers of abstractions, the tooling is horrenduos (try configuring maven vs npm) and especially all complex Java applications end up being as slow as molasses (e.g. SAP GUI, Lotus Notes, Eclipse, jDownloader, Vuze on the GUI application side). This leads to people projecting their horrible experiences with the Java ecosystem and applications to the language itself, which is a pity.
stochastic_monk 9y ago
It's become clear to me that a lot of the Rust fanatics don't actually know how C++ works and and Rust is their first low-level language. The ones I'm talking about know enough to make them sound like they know what they're talking about unless you actually know what they're trying and failing to accurately describe. It sounds and seems like a language worthy of more investigation on my part, but I have to agree that the militant, presumptive attacks on any language besides their Chosen One has left a bad taste in my mouth.
- vvanders 9y ago
  There are those of us who have been writing C++ for decades and are sick of the footguns and build systems but have never had a viable alternative before. I don't think anyone is arguing that we should throw everything out, however for all my greenfield stuff Rust has been a welcome breath of fresh air. Yeah, there are some people who are a little too over the top but a large part of the support behind Rust is from those of us who've used it in production and found it to be a fantastic language and ecosystem.
  - Avshalom 9y ago
    (well I mean there has been Ada* for ages) *or fortran or pascal
    - rufius 9y ago
      The tool chain there is still quite irritating and “old school”. At least for me, part of the attraction of Rust is the development tools around the language itself (e.g. cargo).
      - vvanders 9y ago
        Yeah, in no particular order here's what I love about cargo: Seamless cross-compile. I've done a ton of cross-compile projects, cargo/rustup is the best by far. One-line dependency import. Saves *hours* setting up build chains. First-class win32 support. Hard to stress how rare and awesome this is coming from a gamedev background. Integrated testing. So nice just to have. Integrated benchmarking, ditto above.
teilo 9y ago
I find most of the programming/lang/framework subreddits intolerable. I dip into those waters occasionally, but unsub pretty quick. Too many egos, trolls, asshats, and too much noise. There are notable exceptions, like /r/elixir. But I abandoned /r/python and /r/django months ago, and won't be back. I'm an adult, and prefer to discuss things those who will show at least a modicum of respect to others.
- HumanDrivenDev 9y ago
  The flipside of that is - I'm an adult, I want to talk to people who can handle critiques and debate without getting unduly upset. Disagreement != trolling.
  - teilo 9y ago
    That's not a flipside. That's a restatement of my criticism of these subreddits. There is a difference between constructive criticism and/or correction (which I am all for), and belittling, demeaning, insulting, and cursing at people.
    - HumanDrivenDev 9y ago
      There is a difference between constructive criticism and/or correction (which I am all for), and belittling, demeaning, insulting, and cursing at people. IME a lot of thin skinned people on the internet always view the former as the latter. It's equally as tiresome.
      - kelnos 9y ago
        IME a lot of people use "people need to be less thin skinned" as a weak rationalization for dickish behavior that would get them fired from their job and/or ostracized from their real-life social circle. But since it's online and no one knows who you really are, it's somehow "acceptable". No, it isn't, and communities that encourage or allow that type of behavior are incredibly toxic.
dlbucci 9y ago
I just want to say that that comic is absolutely wonderful. Made my morning :)
_jal 9y ago
There is a sort of social game that seems to emerge at some point, combining the worst of in-group bullshit and logic-puzzlng as a substitute for actually attempting to help folks honestly seeking questions. The game goes like this: start discussing something: say, including rust in OpenBSD. - Assume it (here, using rust in oBSD) is a great idea. - For each objection, explain why it is trivial. Your tools are your own reasoning and knowledge of programming, the ability to ignore, minimize or belittle any and all reasons why things are the way they are, assuming away any legacy issues, and remembering that all needs and use-cases in the world exactly match yours. - When you get bored, just walk away. It isn't your problem, after all, and you were just trying to help. High-fiving your cohort optional. It ends up simultaneously coming off as arrogant and clueless. Last time I had a small problem and the time to try something new, I started it in rust. After getting a series of jackass responses to a simple question[1], I wrote it in C, because I just don't care enough to put up with twits fluffing their own ego at the expense of newbies. This problem is hardly unique to rust - unfortunately it happens everywhere nerds gather. But rust has a really bad case of it. [1] Found the answer a few days later when I thought of a better search term.
- steveklabnik 9y ago
  Where was this? If it was in an official Rust forum, we don't allow "jackass responses", and I'd like to take care of it.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- jancsika 9y ago
  > After getting a series of jackass responses to a simple question Getting those responses where, exactly? If you had mentioned literally any other language with a FLOSS community around it I wouldn't question that statement. However, Rust proponents so clearly claim to do the opposite-- you've even got Steve below explicitly stating that jackassery isn't allowed in Rust forums. What's the data to the contrary?
- wasted_intel 9y ago
HumanDrivenDev 9y ago
One thing proggit has over HN is there's much less political discussion. I find the constant political debates and drivebys here incredibly tiring. Only about one-third the links on the frontpage here of any interest to me as a 'hacker'.
- todd8 9y ago
  I have to agree. There seems to be more and more political/economic discussions here with which most of the posts seem to be from another planet. The more non-technical the discussions, the more strongly and obnoxiously held the positions seem to be.
why15characters 9y ago
Your comic is a really poor analogy. /r/programming is not your house. You are saying you want to be able to publicly denigrate other people, and have those people be prohibited from responding publicly. That's nothing like someone showing up in your house to correct you.
bitwize 9y ago
Hey, better the Rust Evangelism Strikeforce than the C Org, whose members are bound to that billion-year contract maintaining legacy embedded code riddled with buffer overflows and undefined-behavior traps, not to mention broken or brittle build tools. (The billion-year contract is there because that's a lower bound on the expected lifetime of that code base.)
krylon 9y ago
> It reminds me of the Sea Lion comic[1] You nearly made me spray coffee all over my precious Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard. (Which - no joke - would have been the third I would have destroyed this way.) Thank you for starting my day with a healthy dose of laughter! (I know that comic is trying to make a serious point, but the surreal example it chose is just so hilarious!)

rapsey 9y ago

> I sometimes get the feeling people spend more time writing defences of these languages than they spend time writing programs in them. Programmers love language wars.

srcmap 9y ago
> Programmers love language wars Programming Language Advocates love language wars Most programmers just like to be aware of ALL the PROs and CONs of the languages and choose the right one for the task at hand.
Nomentatus 9y ago
In WWII it was famously true that fighter pilots would fiercely argue for the absolute superiority of whatever plane they had been flying for a few months. For example, Thunderbolt pilots hated being moving to Mustangs (etc) - even though to our eyes the Mustang is obviously a superior plane. Once your instincts adapt to something intimately (and programming languages require that); that's what feels right. You'll argue vociferously against a change and use what are objective reasons. (The Thunderbolt could dive faster, it was a brick.) Of course, in the United States Army Air Force, you still had to switch. The old hands usually remain convinced of the superiority of what they know, and irritated by Young Turks telling them something else, nicely or not. Because the Young Turks can't be right. But they are, often.

simias 9y ago

I agree. It makes the community looks childish and inexperienced by association. I think I recall reading somewhere on Rust's website that telling project maintainers to switch to Rust was frowned upon, however I can't find it right now. Sometimes I feel like it should be written in a 20pt font on the home page. Or maybe written in blinking letters every time you run rustup. I always feel it's very presumptuous and somewhat disrespectful to second guess the devs of a project, in particular if you're not a big contributor yourself. Pay your dues. These messages are effectively not a whole lot more useful or insightful than saying "Rust rulez, C droolz" or "have you considered indenting with spaces instead of tabs?".

steveklabnik 9y ago
To be clear, you can take it from me: yes, don't go tell people to re-write things in Rust. Agree 100% that it's presumptuous and disrespectful. At the same time, I don't see it actually happening as much as people say that it happens. Maybe I just don't see those things. If I did, I'd tell them to cut it out.
sgift 9y ago
People have told me for the longest time that Java is a shitty language I shouldn't be using. Most of those people said C++ would be a far better idea without even bothering to show any reason why C++ would be more suited besides "Java is slow, huahuaha, it is shitty, huahahaha". So, I have to admit I take a bit of a pleasure of seeing those people getting challenged on their presumption that C++ is the greatest language on earth. Language advocacy is far older than Rust. And many language advocates are far more obnoxious than what I read on HN with regard to Rust. I actually have the feeling that the C++ crowd is just a bit sad that the usual defense of "well, yeah, other languages do those things better, but the code they produce is far too slow for our problem, so they're useless!" doesn't cut it anymore.
- mschuster91 9y ago
  > People have told me for the longest time that Java is a shitty language I shouldn't be using. Java is a great language in theory, the problem with Java is that people have evolved to use layers upon layers upon even more layers of abstractions, the tooling is horrenduos (try configuring maven vs npm) and especially all complex Java applications end up being as slow as molasses (e.g. SAP GUI, Lotus Notes, Eclipse, jDownloader, Vuze on the GUI application side). This leads to people projecting their horrible experiences with the Java ecosystem and applications to the language itself, which is a pity.

stochastic_monk 9y ago

It's become clear to me that a lot of the Rust fanatics don't actually know how C++ works and and Rust is their first low-level language. The ones I'm talking about know enough to make them sound like they know what they're talking about unless you actually know what they're trying and failing to accurately describe. It sounds and seems like a language worthy of more investigation on my part, but I have to agree that the militant, presumptive attacks on any language besides their Chosen One has left a bad taste in my mouth.

vvanders 9y ago
There are those of us who have been writing C++ for decades and are sick of the footguns and build systems but have never had a viable alternative before. I don't think anyone is arguing that we should throw everything out, however for all my greenfield stuff Rust has been a welcome breath of fresh air. Yeah, there are some people who are a little too over the top but a large part of the support behind Rust is from those of us who've used it in production and found it to be a fantastic language and ecosystem.
- Avshalom 9y ago
  (well I mean there has been Ada* for ages) *or fortran or pascal
  - rufius 9y ago
    The tool chain there is still quite irritating and “old school”. At least for me, part of the attraction of Rust is the development tools around the language itself (e.g. cargo).
    - vvanders 9y ago
      Yeah, in no particular order here's what I love about cargo: Seamless cross-compile. I've done a ton of cross-compile projects, cargo/rustup is the best by far. One-line dependency import. Saves *hours* setting up build chains. First-class win32 support. Hard to stress how rare and awesome this is coming from a gamedev background. Integrated testing. So nice just to have. Integrated benchmarking, ditto above.

teilo 9y ago

I find most of the programming/lang/framework subreddits intolerable. I dip into those waters occasionally, but unsub pretty quick. Too many egos, trolls, asshats, and too much noise. There are notable exceptions, like /r/elixir. But I abandoned /r/python and /r/django months ago, and won't be back. I'm an adult, and prefer to discuss things those who will show at least a modicum of respect to others.

HumanDrivenDev 9y ago
The flipside of that is - I'm an adult, I want to talk to people who can handle critiques and debate without getting unduly upset. Disagreement != trolling.
- teilo 9y ago
  That's not a flipside. That's a restatement of my criticism of these subreddits. There is a difference between constructive criticism and/or correction (which I am all for), and belittling, demeaning, insulting, and cursing at people.
  - HumanDrivenDev 9y ago
    There is a difference between constructive criticism and/or correction (which I am all for), and belittling, demeaning, insulting, and cursing at people. IME a lot of thin skinned people on the internet always view the former as the latter. It's equally as tiresome.
    - kelnos 9y ago
      IME a lot of people use "people need to be less thin skinned" as a weak rationalization for dickish behavior that would get them fired from their job and/or ostracized from their real-life social circle. But since it's online and no one knows who you really are, it's somehow "acceptable". No, it isn't, and communities that encourage or allow that type of behavior are incredibly toxic.

dlbucci 9y ago

I just want to say that that comic is absolutely wonderful. Made my morning :)

_jal 9y ago

There is a sort of social game that seems to emerge at some point, combining the worst of in-group bullshit and logic-puzzlng as a substitute for actually attempting to help folks honestly seeking questions. The game goes like this: start discussing something: say, including rust in OpenBSD. - Assume it (here, using rust in oBSD) is a great idea. - For each objection, explain why it is trivial. Your tools are your own reasoning and knowledge of programming, the ability to ignore, minimize or belittle any and all reasons why things are the way they are, assuming away any legacy issues, and remembering that all needs and use-cases in the world exactly match yours. - When you get bored, just walk away. It isn't your problem, after all, and you were just trying to help. High-fiving your cohort optional. It ends up simultaneously coming off as arrogant and clueless. Last time I had a small problem and the time to try something new, I started it in rust. After getting a series of jackass responses to a simple question[1], I wrote it in C, because I just don't care enough to put up with twits fluffing their own ego at the expense of newbies. This problem is hardly unique to rust - unfortunately it happens everywhere nerds gather. But rust has a really bad case of it. [1] Found the answer a few days later when I thought of a better search term.

steveklabnik 9y ago
Where was this? If it was in an official Rust forum, we don't allow "jackass responses", and I'd like to take care of it.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
jancsika 9y ago
> After getting a series of jackass responses to a simple question Getting those responses where, exactly? If you had mentioned literally any other language with a FLOSS community around it I wouldn't question that statement. However, Rust proponents so clearly claim to do the opposite-- you've even got Steve below explicitly stating that jackassery isn't allowed in Rust forums. What's the data to the contrary?
wasted_intel 9y ago

HumanDrivenDev 9y ago

One thing proggit has over HN is there's much less political discussion. I find the constant political debates and drivebys here incredibly tiring. Only about one-third the links on the frontpage here of any interest to me as a 'hacker'.

todd8 9y ago
I have to agree. There seems to be more and more political/economic discussions here with which most of the posts seem to be from another planet. The more non-technical the discussions, the more strongly and obnoxiously held the positions seem to be.

why15characters 9y ago

Your comic is a really poor analogy. /r/programming is not your house. You are saying you want to be able to publicly denigrate other people, and have those people be prohibited from responding publicly. That's nothing like someone showing up in your house to correct you.

bitwize 9y ago

Hey, better the Rust Evangelism Strikeforce than the C Org, whose members are bound to that billion-year contract maintaining legacy embedded code riddled with buffer overflows and undefined-behavior traps, not to mention broken or brittle build tools. (The billion-year contract is there because that's a lower bound on the expected lifetime of that code base.)

krylon 9y ago

> It reminds me of the Sea Lion comic[1] You nearly made me spray coffee all over my precious Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard. (Which - no joke - would have been the third I would have destroyed this way.) Thank you for starting my day with a healthy dose of laughter! (I know that comic is trying to make a serious point, but the surreal example it chose is just so hilarious!)