You just need to read another 50,000 word fasterthanlime essay. Then you'll not have problems any more.
> That being said, there is an overwhelming force in the Rust community that when anyone mentions they're having problems with Rust the language on a fundamental level, the answer is "you just don't get it yet, I promise once you get good enough things will make sense".
Not only this, but they openly mock other language communities for not drinking the koolaid.
I like Rust, and the Rust community, and fasterthanlime, for what it's worth. But I think these points raised in the article are very much valid.
There's something about the new hot language/framework/paradigm that always attracts the type of people who wrap their identity up in the hot new thing. They take any criticisms of their new favorite thing as criticisms against themselves, and respond defensively.
What I see now in certain Rust communities feels a lot like what I saw in Golang communities in the early days. I had similar experiences when React was the new kid on the block, too.
Some of these communities/forums are just inhabited by people who thrive on dunking on noobs all day long. The good news is that they tend to get bored and move on when the next new thing comes out.
I'm already seeing this in my local Rust community as the chronically online people are moving on to Zig now. They even use one of the Rust discords to advertise their Zig meetups and proselytize about Zig at every opportunity. Eventually they'll get bored and move on.
> > That being said, there is an overwhelming force in the Rust community that when anyone mentions they're having problems with Rust the language on a fundamental level, the answer is "you just don't get it yet, I promise once you get good enough things will make sense".
I don't fully agree with this assessment. In my experience, Rust community members who arrive with well thought out complaints or suggestions are welcomed by the people who like working on programming language fundamentals. You can nerd snipe a lot of Rust enthusiasts by showing up with a difficult problem involving tricky parts of Rust, which will often result in some creative solutions and discussions.
On the other hand, Rust communities are inundated with people trying to write Rust as if it was their old favorite language. I've spent a lot of time trying to get people to unlearn habits from other languages and try to adopt the Rust way of doing things. Some people refuse to let go of paradigms once they've used them for years, so doing things the Rust way isn't going to work for them. I've worked with enough people who spent more time fighting against Rust than trying to adopt Rust ways of doing things that I've also reached the point where I don't engage once I see the conversation going that way. Can't please everyone.
This is perfectly understandable if you view languages as tools. If the new tool can't do something the old one did, then you'll have questions about using it. A great example is inheritance - if inheritance is missing, that's a negative for me. I don't care about the philosophy, I just want to use the tool to produce programs better and faster. If it's missing features, that's a negative point.
Go was released in 2012, Rust in 2015. Are you saying we are still in the early days of Rust?
C was invented in the '70s and only got standardized 20 years later.
And Rust's ~20 years is young in systems lang terms (the alternatives, C and C++, are 50 and 40 years old).
And nobody had TikTok back then.
Yeah. I think there’s also a weird way that newcomers get treated when they join a community. When you’re a newcomer to Rust, you probably have some preconceptions about how Rust should work based on the other languages you know, and you’re probably running into a lot of the same problems with Rust that everyone else has (e.g. borrow checker).
Most of the community is just kinda tired of the discussion and tired of answering the same questions, so they don’t interact with the noobs at all. That means that the people who, as you say, “thrive on dunking on noobs all day long”, are the primary point of contact for noobs.
Finding a decent programming community these days is a pain in the ass. The cool people, i.e., the people working on cool projects and getting shit done, are mostly busy and not hanging out with anybody.
I would say that in general, this type of attitude permeates a lot of software engineering, and even engineering and science as a whole. When I speak with people in other fields, particularly more creative ones, the discussions are so much more improvisational and flowing. Discussions with software developers, engineers, and scientists have this very jerky, start and stop "flow" to them as you meet resistance at each step. I honest to god have had people telling me no or shaking their head no before I ever finished my question or statement, much less before they even understood it.
> There's something about the new hot language/framework/paradigm that always attracts the type of people who wrap their identity up in the hot new thing. They take any criticisms of their new favorite thing as criticisms against themselves, and respond defensively.
You're spot on about the coupling of someone's identity with it. Rust especially seems to also have this never-ending gold rush to be the next framework and library everyone uses, which creates a very competitive landscape. And it seems most frameworks and libraries get 80% of the way and then fizzle out once people realize Rust isn't a magical language that solves all your problems.
And it actually does work that way with Haskell, in my experience. There's a big hill to get over where you flail against the type system, IO monad and all, and then you realize that, while Haskell's type system isn't perfect, being able to say
Num t => (t -> b) -> [t] -> [b]
But Haskell isn't for every problem in the way Rust is apparently made out to be. For example, I've seen some posts about developing games in Haskell, but it isn't common, and nobody would try to push a game developer into using Haskell.
It's certainly not all the way there, but now that we are over the mostly empty promises of encapsulation and (worse) trying to model the world with classes, but grouping by that implicit first argument type for discoverability is exactly what OOP is, in this age of post-OOP.
The "you're not trying hard enough" position reminds me a lot of the Scala community's disdain for java-in-scala-syntax: if you don't use it like an almost-Haskell you're on your own (1). Here, I think Rust is actually more open: I don't read too much of the community, but most of what I saw seemed to be quite welcoming to the idea of placating the borrow checker with refcounting when "the rust way" fails to sufficiently click.
((1) but with Kotlin having taken over the entire not-almost-Haskell part of scala it's not an issue anymore: is has its niche and it fills it well, no more taking over the entire JVM while also magically converting everybody into an almost-Haskellian)
But this article is seeming about someone that has put in the time, has written a lot of Rust, and now says, it wasn't really worth it.
For some tasks, the tradeoff is worth it. Some individuals are naturally very inclined to use it.
But for most people, for most tasks, it's simply not the right tool. It's not a general purpose language by any stretch of the imagination.
I would argue, OS programming is definitely more general than game programming. Rust is great for OS related tasks, math, deep learning n other stuff, and maybe not so great at GUIs, or even bad at that, or just inconvenient as the article points out.
That means, it should be used for general stuff, and for programming games should be used a niche language, like Lua, Python etc. Especially for fast iteration and experimentation, break things and move lightning fast, typed languages are in disadvantage for sure, compared to untyped/weakly typed.
>You just need to read another 50,000 word fasterthanlime essay. Then you'll not have problems any more.
I'm reminded of a line from Hachiman in Oregairu: "Something is only a problem when someone makes it a problem."