Comment by tick_tock_tick
9 months 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.
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?
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.
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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...