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Rust as a language is great and at this point I'd much prefer to use it over C or C++ any day of the week if the application and context permit. However, I don'

by nilkn 6y ago

Rust as a language is great and at this point I'd much prefer to use it over C or C++ any day of the week if the application and context permit. However, I don't think I'd ever want to participate in the Rust community or really even have any contact with it. Everything I've seen of Rust's community has been deeply toxic and hostile to anyone who falls short of worshipping the language and aggressively promoting and defending it at every chance.

jeffdavis 6y ago
I think this is a combination of two things, and is true of many new programming platforms (languages, etc.). 1. If the tech hasn't made full contact with reality yet. For instance, there aren't a diverse set of large projects written in rust yet, so it's a little easier to imagine that it's perfect. 2. We should acknowledge that technology choices have a big impact on one's career. Sure, we are all software engineers that could work in a lot of environments; but we are simply more productive in the ones where we have some experience/depth. If someone is learning rust today, in many respects that's a bet, and they (subconsciously or consciously) have a vested interest in rust's success. More experienced people will usually have a more balanced risk portfolio, spread between proven tech and a few up-and-coming technologies. But for people earlier in their career, it might be a pretty major bet for them.
techntoke 6y ago
That is how the Mozilla community works and the kind of people they attract.
- meh2frdf 6y ago
  This was my opinion too, might be a generalisation, yet it is the impression I and it would seem others have!
Scarbutt 6y ago
Then don't come near the Clojure community either, that's the most cultist one I have encountered.
- pcstl 6y ago
  That has a lot to do with Rich Hickey and Cognitect encouraging cultishness.
- gleenn 6y ago
  Would you care to elaborate? I'm very fond of the language but have found people to be generally pleasant. The only criticism I have is that its a pretty small community so finding fellow Clojurists tends to be hard.
  - peferron 6y ago
    (Not the person you responded to.) My direct interactions with the Clojure community have been very pleasant and helpful, and I have zero complaints there. But when searching around for common questions related to Clojure, I often run into answers along the lines of "Clojure doesn't have X because our language is so superior we don't need it", which does sound cultish. For example, I was looking for GraphQL ClojureScript libs a few days ago, and found a thread where the first answers were essentially: - "If you can’t find a framework that does it, chances are it’s so easy to do in Clojure/ClojureScript that nobody bothers to put an abstraction there" - "Datomic has been doing what GraphQL offers plus much more since like 2013" Both answers are a bit cultish. The first suggests a lack of enlightenment. The second suggests that salvation can be found by embracing the cult even further and locking yourself into a proprietary database invented by Clojure's author and used almost exclusively by Clojurists. (Edit: This thread was from 2017. Such answers may have become more rare since then.)
    - dustingetz 6y ago
      The second was probably me. Sorry about that. My words reflect me as an individual who is sometimes socially challenged, not the wider Clojure community.
      - peferron 6y ago
        Ouch—I didn't link to the thread in my previous comment specifically because I didn't want to point fingers at people who were trying to help back in 2017, even if I disagree with their answers, but here you are anyway! For what it's worth, I'd rather have more people in the Clojure community than fewer, even if I don't always share the same viewpoints.
baq 6y ago
I wonder which community you’re talking about. My experience is rather positive. The infamous Rust evangelization task force is just a bunch of fanbois to put in your killfile.
centimeter 6y ago
They’re also super weirdly political. As a not-especially-political guy I’m super turned off by all the “activism” I see coming out of the community, even where it’s totally irrelevant. I remember seeing a whole thread about how the rust mascot crab is canonically non-gender-binary or something. Wtf?
- derefr 6y ago
  Don't think of it as a community being political. It's not like people pick a programming language and then suddenly one day decide to be political, in part due to their programming-language choices. Think of it instead as "people who are political" looking for a community (not necessarily because of that community's politics, but often for orthogonal reasons, e.g. a language being relatively new and so not yet used by anything they dislike) and then those people being political about their programming wherever they land. If some percentage of programmers are like that, then just statistically, some language is going to end up with a lot of them, whether its maintainers wish to cultivate the community image as being such or not.
- bcrosby95 6y ago
  If discussing the gender of the crab is politics, then surely assuming the crab is one gender or another is also politics. The idea that you can avoid politics in anything is a lie told by people whose beliefs conform to mainstream society. What you're really asking for is everyone to agree with the mainstream view. It's kinda like the old military policy of "don't ask don't tell" - the policy wasn't actually don't ask don't tell - the actual policy was "pretend to be straight". Guys didn't get in trouble for talking about their girlfriend. Beyond that, as someone that doesn't care about politics, I just skip the thread. There are dozens I don't care to read about. It's just another one. No big deal.
  - mmm_grayons 6y ago
    If communities want to go down that road, fine, but then they need to get out of this weird limbo where some views are allowed and some aren't. That means that someone must be just as free to say, "I believe the rust crab should have a normal gender because non-gender-binary is not a thing." without getting banned or cancelled. Right now it's reverted to a very don't-ask-don't-tell-like environment where one can either speak in support of such things or not say anything at all, effectively pretending to agree just as in your military example servicemen had to pretend to be straight.
jasondclinton 6y ago
I'm really confused by your comment because the experience that I have had and in surveys of my coworkers in the Rust community has been uniformly amazing: 1) the technical discussions are always respectful, 2) the in-person conferences have clear code of conducts and the speaker panels represent the best of the engineering and human community, and 3) the community actively encourages people asking newbie questions and goes out of its way to be supportive and non-judgemental when replying. The only counter example that I can think of is the way that the actix unsafe maintainer's behaviour was handled (brigadiering bands of Reddit evangelists flaming him for his own flaming). However, I chock that up to an anomaly caused by Reddit's toxic community and not representative of the Rust community.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
stuzenz 6y ago
I have to say my experience with the community has been really good. Whether it be the reddit channels, discord channels or conversations with people putting rust related stuff on youtube. Maybe you had a particular bad experience after someone mistook your behaviour as trolling - not that you would have been ... I just haven't witnessed any bad behaviour in the community yet - either towards myself or others. If anything, I have appreciated at how much support the informed members are giving to the relative newbies like myself. Not only in advice but listening without ridiculing if the speaker is not that knowledgeable on the topic of conversation. @jasondclinton, I agree with you in regards to the bad experience the actix project owner got in regards to unsafe code use. It was sad to see that happen to an open source contributor (or anyone).
dagmx 6y ago
I’d be curious what your exposure to the Rust community has been and where? Within the Rust reddit or forums, they specifically dissuade blind evangelism and there are often posts critical about the language that get quite a lot of traction. Outside the main rust community, there are definitely zealots but they are usually not accepted by the larger community, and are usually called out. I’m not saying it’s perfect, nor that there aren’t zealots who go overboard. However it’s probably one of the least toxic of the programming communities I frequent (swift, c++, Python, c# , go etc)

by nilkn 6y ago

jeffdavis 6y ago

I think this is a combination of two things, and is true of many new programming platforms (languages, etc.). 1. If the tech hasn't made full contact with reality yet. For instance, there aren't a diverse set of large projects written in rust yet, so it's a little easier to imagine that it's perfect. 2. We should acknowledge that technology choices have a big impact on one's career. Sure, we are all software engineers that could work in a lot of environments; but we are simply more productive in the ones where we have some experience/depth. If someone is learning rust today, in many respects that's a bet, and they (subconsciously or consciously) have a vested interest in rust's success. More experienced people will usually have a more balanced risk portfolio, spread between proven tech and a few up-and-coming technologies. But for people earlier in their career, it might be a pretty major bet for them.

techntoke 6y ago

That is how the Mozilla community works and the kind of people they attract.

meh2frdf 6y ago
This was my opinion too, might be a generalisation, yet it is the impression I and it would seem others have!

Scarbutt 6y ago

Then don't come near the Clojure community either, that's the most cultist one I have encountered.

pcstl 6y ago
That has a lot to do with Rich Hickey and Cognitect encouraging cultishness.
gleenn 6y ago
Would you care to elaborate? I'm very fond of the language but have found people to be generally pleasant. The only criticism I have is that its a pretty small community so finding fellow Clojurists tends to be hard.
- peferron 6y ago
  (Not the person you responded to.) My direct interactions with the Clojure community have been very pleasant and helpful, and I have zero complaints there. But when searching around for common questions related to Clojure, I often run into answers along the lines of "Clojure doesn't have X because our language is so superior we don't need it", which does sound cultish. For example, I was looking for GraphQL ClojureScript libs a few days ago, and found a thread where the first answers were essentially: - "If you can’t find a framework that does it, chances are it’s so easy to do in Clojure/ClojureScript that nobody bothers to put an abstraction there" - "Datomic has been doing what GraphQL offers plus much more since like 2013" Both answers are a bit cultish. The first suggests a lack of enlightenment. The second suggests that salvation can be found by embracing the cult even further and locking yourself into a proprietary database invented by Clojure's author and used almost exclusively by Clojurists. (Edit: This thread was from 2017. Such answers may have become more rare since then.)
  - dustingetz 6y ago
    The second was probably me. Sorry about that. My words reflect me as an individual who is sometimes socially challenged, not the wider Clojure community.
    - peferron 6y ago
      Ouch—I didn't link to the thread in my previous comment specifically because I didn't want to point fingers at people who were trying to help back in 2017, even if I disagree with their answers, but here you are anyway! For what it's worth, I'd rather have more people in the Clojure community than fewer, even if I don't always share the same viewpoints.

baq 6y ago

I wonder which community you’re talking about. My experience is rather positive. The infamous Rust evangelization task force is just a bunch of fanbois to put in your killfile.

centimeter 6y ago

They’re also super weirdly political. As a not-especially-political guy I’m super turned off by all the “activism” I see coming out of the community, even where it’s totally irrelevant. I remember seeing a whole thread about how the rust mascot crab is canonically non-gender-binary or something. Wtf?

derefr 6y ago
Don't think of it as a community being political. It's not like people pick a programming language and then suddenly one day decide to be political, in part due to their programming-language choices. Think of it instead as "people who are political" looking for a community (not necessarily because of that community's politics, but often for orthogonal reasons, e.g. a language being relatively new and so not yet used by anything they dislike) and then those people being political about their programming wherever they land. If some percentage of programmers are like that, then just statistically, some language is going to end up with a lot of them, whether its maintainers wish to cultivate the community image as being such or not.
bcrosby95 6y ago
If discussing the gender of the crab is politics, then surely assuming the crab is one gender or another is also politics. The idea that you can avoid politics in anything is a lie told by people whose beliefs conform to mainstream society. What you're really asking for is everyone to agree with the mainstream view. It's kinda like the old military policy of "don't ask don't tell" - the policy wasn't actually don't ask don't tell - the actual policy was "pretend to be straight". Guys didn't get in trouble for talking about their girlfriend. Beyond that, as someone that doesn't care about politics, I just skip the thread. There are dozens I don't care to read about. It's just another one. No big deal.
- mmm_grayons 6y ago
  If communities want to go down that road, fine, but then they need to get out of this weird limbo where some views are allowed and some aren't. That means that someone must be just as free to say, "I believe the rust crab should have a normal gender because non-gender-binary is not a thing." without getting banned or cancelled. Right now it's reverted to a very don't-ask-don't-tell-like environment where one can either speak in support of such things or not say anything at all, effectively pretending to agree just as in your military example servicemen had to pretend to be straight.

jasondclinton 6y ago

I'm really confused by your comment because the experience that I have had and in surveys of my coworkers in the Rust community has been uniformly amazing: 1) the technical discussions are always respectful, 2) the in-person conferences have clear code of conducts and the speaker panels represent the best of the engineering and human community, and 3) the community actively encourages people asking newbie questions and goes out of its way to be supportive and non-judgemental when replying. The only counter example that I can think of is the way that the actix unsafe maintainer's behaviour was handled (brigadiering bands of Reddit evangelists flaming him for his own flaming). However, I chock that up to an anomaly caused by Reddit's toxic community and not representative of the Rust community.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

stuzenz 6y ago

I have to say my experience with the community has been really good. Whether it be the reddit channels, discord channels or conversations with people putting rust related stuff on youtube. Maybe you had a particular bad experience after someone mistook your behaviour as trolling - not that you would have been ... I just haven't witnessed any bad behaviour in the community yet - either towards myself or others. If anything, I have appreciated at how much support the informed members are giving to the relative newbies like myself. Not only in advice but listening without ridiculing if the speaker is not that knowledgeable on the topic of conversation. @jasondclinton, I agree with you in regards to the bad experience the actix project owner got in regards to unsafe code use. It was sad to see that happen to an open source contributor (or anyone).

dagmx 6y ago

I’d be curious what your exposure to the Rust community has been and where? Within the Rust reddit or forums, they specifically dissuade blind evangelism and there are often posts critical about the language that get quite a lot of traction. Outside the main rust community, there are definitely zealots but they are usually not accepted by the larger community, and are usually called out. I’m not saying it’s perfect, nor that there aren’t zealots who go overboard. However it’s probably one of the least toxic of the programming communities I frequent (swift, c++, Python, c# , go etc)