social.noyu.me

i think rust is great, easily my favourite programming language, and i agree with rust advocates on many things, but the sort of culture war-y way some people approach it gives me the ick, no matter which side you're on

@hikari The "if Rust does it a certain way, it must be right" attitude is infuriating and never more so than when you're actually trying to write Rust. It leads to really shallow thinking about the language.

What's really weird is I've stumbled into interacting with the actual Rust core devs and/or inventors a few times and they're all really nice, humble people who *don't act like this*. You ask about an odd decision & they either talk about complex tradeoffs or are like "oh that was an error"

@hikari Like, I want to be writing Rust, but there are a lot of things in it that come down to "this is a bad thing that was situationally necessary in order to achieve some other goal" and you want to figure out ways to cope with the bad thing and someone's coming along trying to convince you that the bad thing is Good Actually and it's just exhausting and unhelpful.

The only positive thing I can say on this front is I've also interacted with the Go community and they're even worse about this.

@mcc @hikari rust has sooooooo many tradeoffs in it where the root cause (there's no root cause) is that someone burned out trying to improve it and quit

@whitequark @mcc ow ow oof owie ow

(i haven't burned out but it's like, there's a number of little problems with the language i've wanted to fix that i just never did because it'd be so much work)

@hikari @whitequark @mcc YUP

@hikari @whitequark @mcc i want to write a blog post about this at some point, there's no way to ensure work gets done other than blocking stabilization, so stuff either ends up unstable for years or just never implemented because it looks like too much work https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/96709#issuecomment-1181969253

also the rust culture is one of burnout, whole teams are burned out, and so the RFC process is where ideas go to die and you can't get anything done without knowing people personally and spending absurd amounts of time pushing for it yourself

@hikari @whitequark @mcc since this is getting boosted read @elizayer's fantastic blog post that goes into more detail on this https://medium.com/@ElizAyer/organizational-boundary-problems-too-many-cooks-or-not-enough-kitchens-2ddedc6de26a
she also gave a rustconf talk about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0VeZRTZFxE