Comment by _eojb
9 months ago
This is a very brave post to write given how incendiary responses to rust criticism can be, but this matches my experience entirely.
9 months ago
This is a very brave post to write given how incendiary responses to rust criticism can be, but this matches my experience entirely.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Sounds like a forum that scrambles comments could be interesting.
I assure you it happens, but the people targetted this way usually quickly learn what is ok and what isn't to say, especially on rust's reddit. If you wanna see examples, look at my reddit profile (same username). I dared to say bevy was full of hype and false promises and tat the money they get would be better spent elsewhere. And look at the hate i received.
One way i've seen to reduce this is prefixing any posts with "I am not criticizing any engine in particular" even if it's blatantly obvious because the criticism only applies to one.
I guess I interpreted the comment as meaning that the incendiary responses were going to be seen here. I would expect incendiary responses to anything I post on reddit...
> 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?
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.
Ok, do you have a concrete example of this?
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Not parent, but take a look at these:
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".
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.
Check this response to the article within these HN comments: 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.
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.
I'm active on both and have not seen this behavior.
In fact, my experience has been the polar opposite, the rust community has been very friendly and accepting of critique.
So again, I'm going to ask for an example of rust language fanatics frothing at a criticism. If it's such a community problem this should be easy to find correct?
Here's the OPs article on /r/rust and it's both got a fair number of up votes and the top comments are all really positive towards this article. That's what I've seen at typical in the rust community.
https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1cdqdsi/lessons_learn...
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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.
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That does not mirror my experience.
Rust hasn't had a mailing list for roughly a decade now...
[flagged]
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.
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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/Poisoni...