1. It's highly opionated so there's a cult-like element of an ingroup/outgroup, e.g. "we don't have OOP, OOP is bad! if you use it, you are an outsider and we c

1. It's highly opionated so there's a cult-like element of an ingroup/outgroup, e.g. "we don't have OOP, OOP is bad! if you use it, you are an outsider and we can do things better in Rustland here!" 2. It's posed as an alternative to C/C++ which have many historical problems. It's very easy to construct a strawman to show Rust is so much better than those ancient languages. ("here's this trivial buffer overflow bug Rust could have prevented!") 3. It's low-level enough that people feel 1337 for using it but not low-level enough to actually require low-level skills to use it. This is why you can see how in many cases, the "solution" to the borrow checker is just cloning everything - because they have zero idea about how to make performant programs. 4. It doesn't have many established libraries/frameworks compared to other languages, so "I wrote X but Rust" is a viable thing. In other languages, this wouldn't stand because there are already established libraries so interest in new ones is not as high + there are certain quality standards you have to meet. 5. It has certain high-profile features which are easy to explain why they are better - option types and slices for example. These Rustaceans are usually not exposed to functional programming before - so they start to embrace simple forms of functional programming. It makes Rust programs look fairly different compared to similar languages, which is another differentiator. It's easy to showcase the advantages of these features in code snippets, which makes it easy to evangelise.