Like any language that has very cool features, there are people that take that tool as not a tool but a religion.
You can even look in my comment history and see people arguing with me when I say I was a rust fan, but memory safety isn't a requirement in some areas of programming. One person made it there mission to convince me that can't possibly be the case and in (in my example of video games) that any memory bug crashes and game and will make users quit and leave.
I feel like it's a defensive reaction, that people feel like Rust is seeking to obviate arcane skills they've built over the course of their careers. Which I don't think is true, I think there will always be a need for such skills and that Rust has no mission to disrupt other language communities, but I can understand the reaction.
> You can even look in my comment history
Is this the thread you're referring to?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32878868
Because I genuinely don't see what you're talking about. No one seems to "make it their mission" and no one seems to be arguing for Rust in particular, as much as this category of languages.
Rust users are generally friendly to one another, and to people who are interested in Rust. Hoever, some Rust users are toxic when talking to people outside the community or to people who disagree.
That's why a lot of us (in the Rust community) don't notice it; we spend most of the time inside our own community talking to each other and being friendly to each other.
This is a trait common to any bubble or insular community whether it be about politics, religion, economics, or whatever. It's fairly easy to recognize once you get in the habit of dis-identifying with your own side.
There's also a phenomenon in human psychology where we tend to forgive "our side's" misbehavior, presumably because it's in service to a higher ideal and therefore forgivable. It's the difference between "passionately spreading the good word" and "aggressive evangelism", two views of the same action. After learning about this I've even seen it in myself, though hopefully I've learned to counteract it a bit.
Note that this isn't unique to Rust, other languages have this too to an extent.
It's something I really hope we can leave behind, because it's hurting an otherwise beneficial message that Rust can bring a new tradeoff that is favorable for a lot of situations.
I'm not even sure if this is the case. I have seen enough toxic Rust users, but at least in my experience they rarely overlap with who are active in the community. This suggests that they are experiencing typical newcomer syndrome, comparable to Haskell newcomers' urge to write a monad tutorial, and also explains that why a disproportional number of non-Rust users observe toxic Rust users---if you are a Rust user but don't preach about Rust everywhere, how can others tell if you are indeed a Rust user? :-)
If you need an example of the rust community being toxic, I give you https://github.com/actix/actix-web
Look up the history and realize they bullied an open source project leader into leaving open source for good.
I still don't understand the relevance, this neither appears toxic nor to be a discussion of Rust; this looks like they put forward an out-there idea and you didn't care for it, which just seems like a discussion about consumer protection laws. I also don't see the connection from Actix drama to the idea that people are exaggerating the capabilities of Rust or causing problems for other language communities - I don't know much about it, I'm fully willing to believe toxicity was involved, but a breakdown in communication between a maintainer and their community doesn't seem like the behavior we're discussing and I don't see any evidence this was peculiar to Rust and not a phenomenon in open source at large.
I don't want to relitigate some thread I wasn't even a part of, I just don't understand.
My understanding is that negative votes is for things that don’t contribute to discussion, yet all my comments are in the negatives except when I mentioned I actually am using rust. Then suddenly the commenter stops talking about our discussion all together and starts to mention learning rust.
It’s frustrating because I like rust, but I can’t seem to criticize it in the slightest.
After saying everyone was empowered to use their tool, they tried to kick someone off the team for working for Palantir.
Regardless of politics, kinda unfair to make political statements using the rust accounts, then turn around and say other people can’t be part of rust because they work for a company who is political.