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Comment by BoysenberryPi | Hacker News Reader

Building existing tools in a language you are learning has been a thing forever. I would argue it's one of the best ways to learn a language in fact. The README also compares it to existing tools and explains why it's different from them.

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I agree with you. It's so much engaging way to explore a language and try implementing those features we really wanted. Just saying building in Rust is the new fad. I only hope in these projects people take take a little more risk in trying out ideas.

That trend is usually limited to a TodoMVC level of effort. It's not usually about reinventing wheels (or worse). Except in the Rust case, where it almost always is.

That’s a lot of negativity just for someone experimenting with a unique programming language to see what it’s good and bad at. People see a new tool and try to figure out what it excels at and what it falls short at. Rust tends to be an “everything” language and people try to uncover new patterns and techniques.

“How much faster/leaner/more user friendly can I make X when I don’t have to care about safety, performance, or package management?”

I think that the author had the audacity to imply that his project is grater or equal to many people's favorite tools. Add this to the rewrite it in rust meme and people feel entitled to pummel the author to the ground. I call it the righteousness fallacy where the fact that the other side is wrong give oneself permission to be as ugly as it feels good because if the other is wrong, then one can't be anything but right.

I really only had issue with the fact that they decided their hobby project was ready to be shipped using mainstream package managers.

Most of the pummeling is me just defending this viewpoint after getting pummeled for my negativity.

Nothing should be immune from criticism, and something really can't be a "hobby project" and distributed with mainstream package management tools at the same time. You have to pick one. Names are finite.

If this was a "clone my github" only distribution, I'd have kept my mouth completely shut.

I actually didn't have anybody in mind when commenting but the general direction of the discussion. As far as I get your main issue is the name squatting which is okay. Good names are hard to get and this is something that all packet managers should take into account. However, please, don't be too harsh on someone who wants a nice name for their project.

They shipped their hobby project into Homebrew's core tap. 'brew install ox' belongs to them. They've put it out in the world for others to use and have also stated their case for why people should.

This is far above the level of scrutiny of just someone's experiments.

I have a hobby project that is a feature-complete scratch rewrite of Ruby's ActiveRecord, but I'd be kind of an arsehole if I named that something and uploaded it to rubygems.

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