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Comment by unnouinceput | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't. As a freelancer if I type "rust" on upwork right now I get only 26 jobs. If I type "golang" it yelds 104 jobs. But if I type "php" I get 7966 jobs; "java" = 2547 jobs; C# = 1174 jobs. Even "Assembler" gives 292 results, more then double of both rust + golang combined. For me Rust / Golang / Swift are those Instagram "influencers" that the press talk a lot about it but have little power in the harsh reality of the world.

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They've been around for a much shorter period of time. Also, maybe upwork skews toward a different type of jobs.

Swift is 5 years old and yields more results then rust who is 8 years old. You know you have a good one when it picks up and just goes. All of them 3, poor Rust is the most talked about in HN and yet is the least used in real world. As for upwork skewing, you really have no idea what upwork is. They have absolutely zero interest to hide results as their money comes from those jobs people get hired for. So why would they cut their own revenue?

It's not about Upwork intentionally skewing the results as you pointed out, but that there is a potentially sampling bias. Upwork might only attract certain kinds of programming jobs and those are less likely to use Go and Rust.

Except it doesn't work like that at all. In there you have real problems from real people who want the job done. If their problem requires Rust, then trust me, they will ask for Rust. And those are the people who pay the freelancers. As a freelancer I have zero saying in what clients want, I am there to help with their problems, not for them to bow before my choice of programming languages.

Didn't swift have a long, hidden development timeframe? Sure, rust has been public for longer, but it hasn't been stable for very long at all.

Rust inspired Swift heavily. I kinda don't care about Google results. All the big companies are doing something with Rust. Microsoft is doing actix and wants to use rust for IOT, Apple is trying to make Swift more like Rust, Google supports Rust on Fuchsia as a first class language etc.

I didn't say that upwork is skewing it intentionally, I'm saying that the samples aren't representative of the larger population.

And as a freelancer I don't care what company X or company Y does internally. I care only about the jobs I can get. When enough of them will start having problems in Rust and start posting jobs for outside world then maybe I will care about Rust too. Yeah, I know, I'm an a*hole for not loving Rust from 1st second, sorry for caring about my family first and not enough about Rust. </sarcasm>

Look I really don't care. You aren't being sarcastic.

And? Upwork's and HN's crowd are not similar in the statistics sense, the vast majority of Upwork users are not necessarily on HN. On top of that, Upworks's numbers represent the business requirements of enterprises, also has nothing to do what software engineers like.

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