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Comment by hashmal | Hacker News Reader

> Community feels like the good old Ruby days, but better

I really miss that old Ruby community. It was full of that hacker spirit, everyone trying stuff, no one to crush your creativity. Then the startup hipsters took over and came up with good practices, style guides, gems you absolutely had to know to get hired, etc.

It drove me away from Ruby, actually. It just wasn't fun anymore.

I hope it doesn't happen with Rust. I did not have so much fun writing code for a long time.

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Your comment really speaks to me. I'm in the process of transitioning my career out of development altogether for the reason you mentioned getting out of Ruby. It just isn't fun anymore. I haven't been able to find a company with a good hacker-spirit since 2010. I like programming, and will probably continue with languages like Elixir and Haskell, but as far as the day-to-day work goes, I'm done.

Is that, perhaps, more to do with JS fatigue than anything related to Ruby or Rails? What I can't fathom is how every shitty little SPA has to be done in React these days.

Just go into lower level. In many companies people have message brokers that need consumers. That's a good place to introduce languages such as Scala, Rust, Haskell and so on. Try to stay away from frontend and hack away.

This definitely feels my own golden age now being able to write Rust and seeing all these great people doing interesting projects and hacking things...

The ecosystem and the community is fantastic. But I have to say, Rust is a harsh mistress. Guess I need more practise.

Rust is a very different beast indeed. The fun clearly doesn't come from the "flexibility/easiness" of the language (compared to Ruby), but really from the feeling that we're all still discovering a new paradigm, new ways to do things using its various features. Building state machines out of the type system is an example. Rust is still kind of a blank canvas just asking to be painted on.

Yes. I think the biggest thing it has going for it is that it is an advanced language offering superior guarantees, but lacks the smell of academic elitism that Haskell and Scala carry. Its a working mans tool, with a welcoming culture that disapproves of intellectual status games and too much jargon.

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