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Comment by ianbertolacci | Hacker News Reader

Have they considered rewriting it in rust?

Well, considering that the program was "written" into the ROM by winding wire around ferrite cores, I'd say it was literally written in rust.

hehe

(A friend of mine, who when in search of a new go-to-programming language instead of Python, was more interested in Swift vs Rust because of this attitude).

Remind your friend these comments are only left by a small vocal minority and is not representative of the project or its maintainers.

This is akin to not liking something because you don't like the people who already like it, despite how much you'd like it otherwise.

Clue me in! What kind of comments are we talking about? Anything inappropriate here must have gone over my head.

The two aspects my friend's perception of the Rust community are both a) rewriting existing projects in Rust for the sake of having a version written in Rust[1][2], and b) it seems a frequent trend on Hacker News to see comments about "why didn't you write it in Rust" or "how about porting it to Rust" on posts about projects and "should have written it in Rust" comments on posts about security bugs. As the parent to your comment points out, this is probably a small group in the community who comments often.

As I could see from the way my score, on the post that started this discussion fluctuated, this is clearly a topic some are both sensitive about or like find humor in (or both!).

EDIT: I didn't mean to derail the discussion of a fascinating code posting; but I assume the comment I responded to that spawned this tangent, "Have they considered rewriting it in rust?"[3], was a joke made about the other comments on HN to rewrite things in Rust.

[1]: From a pedagogical standpoint, obviously this is a potentially good way of learning a language so if for learning and not pure calorie burn I personally don't see this as wasteful.

[2]: <<possibly exaggeration warning>> I understand there is some motivations within (perhaps a small part) the Rust community to replace the world'S C-systems-code with more secure Rust code.

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12049521

> Remind your friend these comments are only left by a small vocal minority and is not representative of the project or its maintainers.

Thanks for mentioning this, I certainly will the next time. The last time this came up, this was not an attitude I had previously noticed, although did see a bunch on Hacker News the following week

> This is akin to not liking something because you don't like the people who already like it, despite how much you'd like it otherwise.

I would totally agree with this, but at the same time, while not a technical reason, if one works in primarily a single programming language I can imagine the nature of the community would be a legitimate factor to consider---in this case though as you point out, it would be an inaccurate opinion of the nature of the Rust community.

Sorry for the late reply.

To your last point, I agree slightly as well but my rebuttal would be that each person chooses how much and at what level to participate in a community they are in and which sub-communities they identify closer with.

I can imagine a person being proficient and working in any language without the need for them to be involved with the community at all, or if they do need to interact do so in a read-only matter.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com