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This is a very brave post to write given how incendiary responses to rust criticism can be, but this matches my experience entirely.

• cogman10 2y ago
  > incendiary responses to rust criticism can be I've not experienced this. Do you have examples of the rust community flaming someone for having negative opinions about the language?
  • chimen 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • cmrdporcupine 2y ago
      You were flagged for no such thing. You were flagged for a pointless quip about "woke"ness. Other people repeated more civil and reasonably argued forms of your same point about the language and its community and received no such downvotes. No need to play martyr.
      • chimen 2y ago
        [flagged]
        • Dylan16807 2y ago
          If you blame the wrong reason for downvotes, expect to be corrected. Your complaint here is invalid. Try criticizing Rust next time, if you want to demonstrate that criticizing Rust gets downvotes. You were throwing out insults in your very first comment.
  • tick_tock_tick 2y ago
    I'd go read their mailing list and Reddit forms; especially when people run into issues doing stuff that's very simple in other languages. Never seen a more toxic programming community. Hopefully they calm down, or really get drown out, once there are a real number of jobs for people using Rust. Right now the evangelists outnumber the rank and file who are just using a language to get work done.
    • the_mitsuhiko 2y ago
      That does not mirror my experience.
    • gpm 2y ago
      Rust hasn't had a mailing list for roughly a decade now...
    • astrange 2y ago
      If it helps, they can't possibly be as toxic as Lisp programmers used to be, where more or less any online conversation would start with someone new asking a question and Erik Naggum replying that they were a moron who should die.
      • cogman10 2y ago
        Lol, I had a similar example with perl as a young teen programmer. They've gotten way nicer.
      • kazinator 2y ago
        Why is it that, say, C programmers, as such, don't get painted according to what has historically gone on in the comp.lang.c newsgroup?
        • astrange 2y ago
          Probably because there's so many more of them. Maybe because being called not a real UNIX programmer feels different from being called a Blub programmer.
          • kazinator 2y ago
            Maybe I should ask: why should someone interested about Lisp today have to hear stories about some Erik Naggum who posted to a Usenet newsgroup, and died 15 years ago? Let's assume that the newsgroup is important. Legendary Lisp hacker Alan Bawden posted there just last week or so. Nobody ever mentions him.
  • VancouverMan 2y ago
    Based on what I've seen, various forms of censorship and suppression are often employed in such cases, rather than outright "flaming" or other discussion-based approaches. It really depends on where and how the discussion is taking place, and what censorship methods the website/platform/medium involved offers. Sometimes users are just outright banned or shadow-banned, if those happen to be options. Sometimes forum threads, bug reports, or comments are deleted. Sometimes the discussion remains accessible, but is stifled in some way. This includes closing/locking forum threads or bug reports, or otherwise severely limiting participation in such discussions to a very small and isolated group of people. If down-voting/reporting systems are present, sometimes they're used to limit the visibility or prominence of such discussion.
    • cogman10 2y ago
      Ok, do you have a concrete example of this?
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      • VancouverMan 2y ago
        I haven't rigorously tracked all of the instances I've seen of this happening over the years, but I've tried to quickly find some more prominent examples for you. This bug report, for example, has various "This comment has been minimized.", "rust-lang deleted a comment from ...", "rust-lang locked and limited conversation to collaborators" interference: https://github.com/rust-lang/team/pull/671 https://github.com/rust-lang/team/pull/671 A Reddit thread discussing the situation from that bug report mentioned above has numerous "[removed]" comments and down-voted comments: https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/qzme1z/moderation_team_resignation/ https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/qzme1z/moderation_tea... When Rust is discussed here, it's common enough for reasonable and relevant Rust-related comments to be voted down, sometimes severely. These threads have some examples I quickly found via a search of high-activity Rust submissions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24334731&p=2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24334731&p=2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24343867 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24343867 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23802674 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23802674 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26812047&p=2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26812047&p=2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29488336 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29488336 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11340100 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11340100 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24337001 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24337001 Here's an example of a recent submission on this site for an article very reasonably and thoroughly questioning Rust. It got some attention, and now it's currently marked as "[flagged]": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40091427 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40091427 Keep in mind that strict "moderating" (ie, censoring) has been an integral part of the Rust community's identity for many years now via its Code of Conduct and Moderation Team - https://www.rust-lang.org/policies/code-of-conduct https://www.rust-lang.org/policies/code-of-conduct https://www.rust-lang.org/governance/teams/moderation https://www.rust-lang.org/governance/teams/moderation
  • googh 2y ago
    Not parent, but take a look at these: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32117148 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32117148 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39641552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39641552 These threads are absolutely painful to read. The Rust community/leadership would not do anything about it because Rust thrives on such "devotion".
    • alecthomas 2y ago
      Damn, that second one is excruciating to read. I wonder if they're aware of how they put people off the Rust ecosystem with their rabid defensiveness.
  • gg2222 2y ago
    Check this response to the article within these HN comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40177534 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40177534 Not actually flaming but quite condescending towards the article writer. Not even properly reading the article and coming to conclusions. This is on HN which is generally more neutral towards Rust. I imagine in Rust circles these types of responses would come out a lot more.
• sanderjd 2y ago
  I think I just read about 10 versions of this comment on this page, and definitely not a single response to the criticism that could be described as incendiary. I don't think I even saw a single comment just now that fundamentally pushed back on the premise of this article, let alone in an incendiary way. It's early yet, and maybe this thread will look very different in a few hours though?
  • thegrim33 2y ago
    The author maybe somewhat hit on the reason for this in the article, where they mentioned that they're already seeing some of the rabid, toxic, Rust proponents already moving onto the next "hot" thing and doing their thing there. So maybe after a few years of Rust we've arrived at the turning point now where enough of those types of people have finally moved on and the Rust community has significantly changed.
    • logicprog 2y ago
      I don't think that's the case. N=1, but I'm usually a quite staunch, and occasionally incendiary, proponent of Rust, because the arguments against it / criticisms of it I usually see seem fundamentally misguided or even disingenuous to me — whereas in this thread, I've been only agreeing, because the criticisms are fair (I agree Rust isn't built for, and is quite bad at, prototyping, fast iteration, flexible code, etc), if I think a bit overblown (I think many of the patterns the author complains about being forced to use like command lists and generational arenas are very good). That could be the difference you're seeing, IMO.
  • ziddoap 2y ago
    Perhaps because the article is about how Rust isn't the magic bullet to everything, and a few people have commented agreeing with the article, others feel more willing to comment their own Rust isn't perfect opinion as well. If you go into the comment section of a pro-Rust article, where the first few top-level comments are also pro-Rust, the responses to people expressing a negative attitude about Rust tend to (in my experience) be different. This phenomenon certainly isn't exclusive to Rust (or HN). It happens all the time, especially when a prolific commenter is among the first few comments. It can set the tone for the entire comment section.
• SantalBlush 2y ago
  This is a textbook example of poisoning the well. [0] We see it used in every discussion about pros and cons of a language on HN. It's some variation of "People who like this language can't handle criticism/are part of a cult/etc." The idea being that this will preclude anyone from responding to a criticism, because that would confirm the comment. [0] https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Poisoning-the-Well https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Poisoni...