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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

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.

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.