Comment by cogman10
9 months 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?
9 months 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?
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?
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://www.rust-lang.org/governance/teams/moderation
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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...
It may not be flaming, but the author brings up a particular quote repeatedly. "You just don't get it/have enough experience with it yet."
I've seen this everywhere. This is an obnoxious, lazy thing to say to someone. It's a go to for many "enlightened" languages that have small ecosystems and something to prove. The only response is to ignore it entirely or, like the author did, dedicate years of your life just to see if there's something to it. This is not okay. Life is short, and we lean on other developers experience to keep us from wasting our time.
If someone posts a topic wondering if X language is bad for something, it's an earnest question. Not a time to flex your dedication to the cause.
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.
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?
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"toxic" is also to generalize from one person / one forum, to an extremely diverse group, many which never used Usenet
Lol, I had a similar example with perl as a young teen programmer.
They've gotten way nicer.
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.
[flagged]
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