(joke in the title stolen from a redditor)
Context: some Rust kid vandalized cppreference.com today.
An attitude I’ve seen a lot among software developers is that basically there aren’t “good languages” and “bad languages.” That all languages are equal and all criticisms of particular languages and all opinions that some particular language is “bad” are invalid.
I couldn’t disagree more.
The syntax, tooling, standard library, third-party libraries, documentation quality, language maintainers’ policies, etc are of course factors that can be considered when evaluating how “good” a language is. But definitely one of the biggest factors that should be considered is how assholeish the community around a particular language is.
A decade or two ago, Ruby developers had a reputation for being smug and assholeish. I can’t say I knew a statistically significant number of Ruby developers, but the ones I did know definitely embodied that stereotype. I’ve heard recently that the Rust community has similar issues.
The Rust language has some interesting features that have made me want to look deeper, but what I’ve heard about the community around Rust has so far kept me away.
I write Java for a paycheck, but for my side projects, Go is my (no pun intended) go-to language. I’ve heard nothing but good things about its community. I think I’ll stick with it for a while.
In my experience the actual rust community that you’ll be seeing if you work with the language is actually incredibly nice and open minded. It’s got a lot of autistic people and other minorities who are more emotionally mature than a lot of adults. Rust people can be smug sometimes talking to “outsiders” but once you’re in the community the problem disappears