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I don't understand why people care so much about these online faux-communities. A language or technology should be able stand on its own without a community. Ru

I don't understand why people care so much about these online faux-communities. A language or technology should be able stand on its own without a community. Rust can easily do that. It does for me. I couldn't care less about whatever culture war people are trying to inject into this.

LAC-Tech 4y ago
Well to play devils advocate; learning rust was pretty hard for me, definitely needed help from the community (readers may judge that it says more about me than rust if they wish).
- qwertox 4y ago
  I think his comment goes more in the direction of "Pythonistas" or "Rustaceans". When I coded in C/C++ about 15 years ago I never felt like a part of a "C" community, same the last 15 years I coded with Python (and Java), I'd never consider myself as a "Pythonista", even though I love the language and the effort everybody puts into making this language so useful as well as learnable. The Rust community is also really helpful and well structured in the sense that you know what to expect from a contribution (like a crate), but I'll never label myself as a Rustacean even if I'd start using Rust as my primary language. These "groups" seem strange to me, almost like a cult which I feel is out of place. Like a group of Americans learning and using the Italian language calling themselves "Italians" just to point out that they have a special relation to that language which others don't have. The analogy doesn't really work, because there are no such person's like born "Pythonistas", but it somehow illustrates the vibe these groups apparently want to irradiate. I love the languages for what they are, and the love and effort the communities put into them shows more through the language itself than through a label a community gives itself.
  - lamontcg 4y ago
    Yeah there was nowhere near as much of this tribalistic nonsense in the 90s. The millennial affinity to identity and tribalism, in general, is quite weird.
    - djur 4y ago
      If there is a trend toward identity and tribalism, it would be a pretty natural response to the midcentury trend toward isolated nuclear families and hyper-individualism. My recollection was that culture in the '90s was actually quite obsessed with "tribes" and identity as a direct reaction to the dog-eat-dog '80s.
    - heavyset_go 4y ago
      I see it as more of a deliberate community building choice, one that we've seen for decades and one that's more popular now than ever, I'd argue, and not some "millennial" propensity towards tribalism. Every brand/product/service/etc is trying to create communities around themselves, with fan clubs, VIP memberships, social media groups, email lists, Zoom/in-person conferences/webinars, etc. It used to be you had to have a ton of reach and value to pull those off before the internet, now every project has marketing and social media people doing the same thing online.
    - lostdog 4y ago
      Really? I know it was mostly 2000s, but a lot of Paul Graham's writing was about how great Lisp is [1]. It also sounds like the C versus C++ arguments were wild too if Linus is still riled up about it. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/iflisp.html http://www.paulgraham.com/iflisp.html
      - lamontcg 4y ago
        I used to program Perl and C on various *nix systems in the 90s. I wasn't a Perlist or C-ist or Unix-ista. I didn't need to hate Macs and Windows and C++ as part of my identity.
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      There was, if you had access to Usenet. Delphi versus VB, VB vs C++, Pascal vs C, C vs C++...
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - LAC-Tech 4y ago
    oh right I see what you mean. I'm a late millennial and I've so far avoided putting too much of my self identity into tech I like. At the same time - it takes all sorts to make a village, right? Those superfans of this or that language, library, database, whatever.. I'm glad they exist in the world and share their knowledge.
tialaramex 4y ago
Culture eats strategy for breakfast [edited, this used to say lunch because I'm tired and should go to bed] Rust's safety in practice is a cultural phenomenon. For example, you could (using "unsafe") write an implementation of Index for your Rust type which has the exact same unsafety as the typical C++ operator[]. In Rust the community will insist your type is broken, an unsafe Index is wrong, whereas in C++ most of the community would see that as fine, why should operator[] be safe? After all the standard library's types behave this way. Culture is the only difference here. So, in fact culture is crucial to Rust's success. Now, you could try to argue that it's unrelated, that there's this nice neat line between some cultural decisions like "Is it OK not to exhibit type safe behaviour?" and some other cultural decisions like "Is it OK to make racist jokes in my documentation?" but turns out that wherever you think that line "obviously" goes lot of people disagree and you're going to spend all your time fighting about that if you insist it's real.
- dwohnitmok 4y ago
  This is something that I wish more designers of programming languages paid attention to. We often say that programming languages succeed or fail based entirely on social factors, but I don't think that we always fully internalize what that means. Given how important the programming culture surrounding a programming language is to determining how day-to-day usage of the programming language actually plays out, programming language features should not only be judged on their technical pros and cons, but also on the kind of culture that they tend to promote, which is very much an extrinsic, social thing. There are certain features that tend to draw in certain kinds of programmers and repel other kinds of programmers. Those programmers will in turn pull in all sorts of other technical baggage that has a variety of other technical knock-on effects. Hence when creating a new programming language, we should think carefully about what kind of culture certain programming language features promote and what kinds of programmers those features would attract and repel, because those can ultimately twist the programming language in ways far more influential than any of its original features.
  - garbagecoder 4y ago
    I have nothing against the language and if it suits my purpose I will use it, and I have. But I don't want to use it for everything and I don't want to be told I should. For me it kinda either works or it doesn't. I'm not sure what kind of community it would take, like I dunno some programming language for racists or ISIS or something, but I don't think people should let it bother them. The Rust community reminds me a lot of Bitcoin. You cannot say anything without a reply-guy telling you why you're wrong, even if it's just something minor. I already see all kinds of "it's in the kernel" posts in here too. (Hint: it's "in the kernel" is actually an argument against its use for, say, the web--not for it.) This is just another instance of the tired cycle of people not understanding most problems in tech need evolution, even though the big things come from revolution. Just look at how mad people get about Apple's "forced obsolescence." You cannot start everything from scratch even for revolutionary gains. Are there revolutionary gains with Rust? Well, I don't think it should be that hard to make revolutionary gains over a language that's the same age as I am. It would probably be better if everything was written from the ground up, but unless AI does it for us, that's a lot of wasted man-hours. Apple still hasn't rewritten its entire stack in Swift, much less its kernel, and no one in the industry moves much faster than they do. I would definitely consider starting any PC-based project (Rust doesn't very many platforms) that I might have used C++ or C for in Rust. And I prefer to used either a very low level language or a very high level language or two together (e.g., asm libraries with Python) and maybe one day Rust will work for me for that, though it has a huge runtime too. Mostly that doesn't matter. I just try not to blame the language and it's good features for the obnoxious reply-guy cults that surround it. There are worse languages with good communities and definitely worse communities out there. But no, I don't want to rewrite my MODplayer from 1990 in Rust.
mlindner 4y ago
As someone else who likes Rust quite a lot but has had a couple poor run-ins with 'The Rust Community™', I completely agree. A core part of 'The Rust Community™' seems to adopt extreme political viewpoints that act to alienate part of the population so I strongly say I love Rust but I try to ignore that 'The Rust Community™' even exists.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

LAC-Tech 4y ago

Well to play devils advocate; learning rust was pretty hard for me, definitely needed help from the community (readers may judge that it says more about me than rust if they wish).

qwertox 4y ago
I think his comment goes more in the direction of "Pythonistas" or "Rustaceans". When I coded in C/C++ about 15 years ago I never felt like a part of a "C" community, same the last 15 years I coded with Python (and Java), I'd never consider myself as a "Pythonista", even though I love the language and the effort everybody puts into making this language so useful as well as learnable. The Rust community is also really helpful and well structured in the sense that you know what to expect from a contribution (like a crate), but I'll never label myself as a Rustacean even if I'd start using Rust as my primary language. These "groups" seem strange to me, almost like a cult which I feel is out of place. Like a group of Americans learning and using the Italian language calling themselves "Italians" just to point out that they have a special relation to that language which others don't have. The analogy doesn't really work, because there are no such person's like born "Pythonistas", but it somehow illustrates the vibe these groups apparently want to irradiate. I love the languages for what they are, and the love and effort the communities put into them shows more through the language itself than through a label a community gives itself.
- lamontcg 4y ago
  Yeah there was nowhere near as much of this tribalistic nonsense in the 90s. The millennial affinity to identity and tribalism, in general, is quite weird.
  - djur 4y ago
    If there is a trend toward identity and tribalism, it would be a pretty natural response to the midcentury trend toward isolated nuclear families and hyper-individualism. My recollection was that culture in the '90s was actually quite obsessed with "tribes" and identity as a direct reaction to the dog-eat-dog '80s.
  - heavyset_go 4y ago
    I see it as more of a deliberate community building choice, one that we've seen for decades and one that's more popular now than ever, I'd argue, and not some "millennial" propensity towards tribalism. Every brand/product/service/etc is trying to create communities around themselves, with fan clubs, VIP memberships, social media groups, email lists, Zoom/in-person conferences/webinars, etc. It used to be you had to have a ton of reach and value to pull those off before the internet, now every project has marketing and social media people doing the same thing online.
  - lostdog 4y ago
    Really? I know it was mostly 2000s, but a lot of Paul Graham's writing was about how great Lisp is [1]. It also sounds like the C versus C++ arguments were wild too if Linus is still riled up about it. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/iflisp.html http://www.paulgraham.com/iflisp.html
    - lamontcg 4y ago
      I used to program Perl and C on various *nix systems in the 90s. I wasn't a Perlist or C-ist or Unix-ista. I didn't need to hate Macs and Windows and C++ as part of my identity.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    There was, if you had access to Usenet. Delphi versus VB, VB vs C++, Pascal vs C, C vs C++...
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- LAC-Tech 4y ago
  oh right I see what you mean. I'm a late millennial and I've so far avoided putting too much of my self identity into tech I like. At the same time - it takes all sorts to make a village, right? Those superfans of this or that language, library, database, whatever.. I'm glad they exist in the world and share their knowledge.

tialaramex 4y ago

Culture eats strategy for breakfast [edited, this used to say lunch because I'm tired and should go to bed] Rust's safety in practice is a cultural phenomenon. For example, you could (using "unsafe") write an implementation of Index for your Rust type which has the exact same unsafety as the typical C++ operator[]. In Rust the community will insist your type is broken, an unsafe Index is wrong, whereas in C++ most of the community would see that as fine, why should operator[] be safe? After all the standard library's types behave this way. Culture is the only difference here. So, in fact culture is crucial to Rust's success. Now, you could try to argue that it's unrelated, that there's this nice neat line between some cultural decisions like "Is it OK not to exhibit type safe behaviour?" and some other cultural decisions like "Is it OK to make racist jokes in my documentation?" but turns out that wherever you think that line "obviously" goes lot of people disagree and you're going to spend all your time fighting about that if you insist it's real.

dwohnitmok 4y ago
This is something that I wish more designers of programming languages paid attention to. We often say that programming languages succeed or fail based entirely on social factors, but I don't think that we always fully internalize what that means. Given how important the programming culture surrounding a programming language is to determining how day-to-day usage of the programming language actually plays out, programming language features should not only be judged on their technical pros and cons, but also on the kind of culture that they tend to promote, which is very much an extrinsic, social thing. There are certain features that tend to draw in certain kinds of programmers and repel other kinds of programmers. Those programmers will in turn pull in all sorts of other technical baggage that has a variety of other technical knock-on effects. Hence when creating a new programming language, we should think carefully about what kind of culture certain programming language features promote and what kinds of programmers those features would attract and repel, because those can ultimately twist the programming language in ways far more influential than any of its original features.
- garbagecoder 4y ago
  I have nothing against the language and if it suits my purpose I will use it, and I have. But I don't want to use it for everything and I don't want to be told I should. For me it kinda either works or it doesn't. I'm not sure what kind of community it would take, like I dunno some programming language for racists or ISIS or something, but I don't think people should let it bother them. The Rust community reminds me a lot of Bitcoin. You cannot say anything without a reply-guy telling you why you're wrong, even if it's just something minor. I already see all kinds of "it's in the kernel" posts in here too. (Hint: it's "in the kernel" is actually an argument against its use for, say, the web--not for it.) This is just another instance of the tired cycle of people not understanding most problems in tech need evolution, even though the big things come from revolution. Just look at how mad people get about Apple's "forced obsolescence." You cannot start everything from scratch even for revolutionary gains. Are there revolutionary gains with Rust? Well, I don't think it should be that hard to make revolutionary gains over a language that's the same age as I am. It would probably be better if everything was written from the ground up, but unless AI does it for us, that's a lot of wasted man-hours. Apple still hasn't rewritten its entire stack in Swift, much less its kernel, and no one in the industry moves much faster than they do. I would definitely consider starting any PC-based project (Rust doesn't very many platforms) that I might have used C++ or C for in Rust. And I prefer to used either a very low level language or a very high level language or two together (e.g., asm libraries with Python) and maybe one day Rust will work for me for that, though it has a huge runtime too. Mostly that doesn't matter. I just try not to blame the language and it's good features for the obnoxious reply-guy cults that surround it. There are worse languages with good communities and definitely worse communities out there. But no, I don't want to rewrite my MODplayer from 1990 in Rust.

mlindner 4y ago

As someone else who likes Rust quite a lot but has had a couple poor run-ins with 'The Rust Community™', I completely agree. A core part of 'The Rust Community™' seems to adopt extreme political viewpoints that act to alienate part of the population so I strongly say I love Rust but I try to ignore that 'The Rust Community™' even exists.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]