Comment by harry8 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by harry8 | Hacker News Reader

You have to take all this with a mountain of salt. Boosterism is the norm in our space, sadly. If one devotes time to learning a technology it is personally advantageous if that technology takes off. Hence you get this kind of "My programming language and community are already wonderfully perfect and kick more goals than there are nets to kick into" stuff. And the worse, yet related utter rubbish we see all the time. "C is a virus", "Perl is line noise", "failure to use JVM style garbage collection is idiotic and unsafe". etc etc. You can swap out those languages and swap in any others you like. It's pervasive and that is a shame.

This is the same kind of thing even if less stomach turning than the negative crud. It's pretty crappy and doesn't really belong here any more than Oracle and IBM global services adverts do. It is not anything like objective and in any sensible assessment of Rust should be roundly ignored. Just like big consulting firm whitepaper "Are you enterprise ready!?!?!"

All the very best to Rust hackers, may you achieve your technical goals in both your design and implementations and have loads of fun on the way!

Yes, people who promote a language are biased. But so are people who resist that language: they tend to have existing investments in their favourite languages, and have inertia in moving to a new language. I personally haven't decided to learn Rust yet, but I still appreciate being kept up-to-date on the landscape of programming languages, and I want to know about the cool new languages as well as the solid old ones.

It's a list of facts. You don't need a "mountain of salt" to take a list of simple, easy to check facts.

> you get this kind of "My programming language and community are already wonderfully perfect and kick more goals than there are nets to kick into"

It doesn't say how wonderful Rust is, it says how many contributions it had, how many users on gitter, etc. You can interpret that like you want, but that's just your interpretation.

It's guerilla marketing where one person's fact is another's spin: the Amazon job requiring in-depth domain knowledge and leadership skills mentions rich Java or C++ experience as desirable while also requiring familiarity with Python or Rust.

The resulting fact is then "Amazon is hiring for developers with Rust experience.". If a candidate checks the other boxes they'd probably hire them if they knew VisualBasic... :)

Personally I don't like this forceful advertising stuff unless maaybe it's for a really good social cause which is otherwise ignored. e.g: privacy

How is it forceful? It's a link on a link board site. It said it was about Rust in the title. If you don't care about promotion of Rust, you should probably have not read the article.

This attitude pisses me off because advertising is a necessary task in all projects. It doesn't matter if it's commercial or completely free, volunteer-built open source software. You need to advertise the project to ensure enough people know about it to achieve a lasting, critical mass of users and developers. But this attitude establishes a norm of resentment towards project maintainers who are just trying to do well by their projects and their users. I think young people pick up on this and it makes them reluctant to promote their own projects.

I have no use for "know your place"isms.

It's what happens when people identify intellectual ability (or other positive attribute) with tool choice, and also wish to identify themselves as having that attribute.

Most people identify intellectual ability with opinions.

Is that an opinion?

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