Comment by 8s2ngy
4 days ago
I understand your perspective. I like to view niche languages as a medium for learning. For instance, I enjoy using Rust in my personal projects—even if many of these projects may never be released—because the lessons on immutability, functional programming constructs, and trait-oriented programming significantly enhance my day-to-day work. Therefore, I believe that learning niche languages, even in the absence of a robust job market, is worthwhile.
I'm not sure I'd call Rust a "niche language" any more (perhaps in ~2018) - it's in common use across many big technology companies.
It is extremely niche outside of this bubble.
According to Stack Overflow developer survey [0] Rust is at 12.5%, roughly a half of C# or Java and a quarter of Python. Also more than twice Ruby. So definitely not niche.
[0] https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#most-popular...
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MS is starting to use Rust pretty extensively internally. That's a lot of developers outside the "bubble."
F# will likely remain niche forever. It’s likely that Rust will not given its growing and accelerating adoption by Microsoft, Google and the Linux Kernel.
It just takes time to defeat the 40+ years of c and c++ dominance.
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Just look at the job market. There are far more jobs for Go programmers and Go isn't particularly huge.
Compared with C/C++, Java, C#, Javascript, Python, Typescript, PHP, all the rest can be considered niche.