The only counter example that I can think of is the way that the actix unsafe maintainer's behaviour was handled (brigadiering bands of Reddit evangelists flaming him for his own flaming). However, I chock that up to an anomaly caused by Reddit's toxic community and not representative of the Rust community.
Within the Rust reddit or forums, they specifically dissuade blind evangelism and there are often posts critical about the language that get quite a lot of traction.
Outside the main rust community, there are definitely zealots but they are usually not accepted by the larger community, and are usually called out.
I’m not saying it’s perfect, nor that there aren’t zealots who go overboard. However it’s probably one of the least toxic of the programming communities I frequent (swift, c++, Python, c# , go etc)
1. If the tech hasn't made full contact with reality yet. For instance, there aren't a diverse set of large projects written in rust yet, so it's a little easier to imagine that it's perfect.
2. We should acknowledge that technology choices have a big impact on one's career. Sure, we are all software engineers that could work in a lot of environments; but we are simply more productive in the ones where we have some experience/depth. If someone is learning rust today, in many respects that's a bet, and they (subconsciously or consciously) have a vested interest in rust's success. More experienced people will usually have a more balanced risk portfolio, spread between proven tech and a few up-and-coming technologies. But for people earlier in their career, it might be a pretty major bet for them.
Think of it instead as "people who are political" looking for a community (not necessarily because of that community's politics, but often for orthogonal reasons, e.g. a language being relatively new and so not yet used by anything they dislike) and then those people being political about their programming wherever they land. If some percentage of programmers are like that, then just statistically, some language is going to end up with a lot of them, whether its maintainers wish to cultivate the community image as being such or not.
It's kinda like the old military policy of "don't ask don't tell" - the policy wasn't actually don't ask don't tell - the actual policy was "pretend to be straight". Guys didn't get in trouble for talking about their girlfriend.
Beyond that, as someone that doesn't care about politics, I just skip the thread. There are dozens I don't care to read about. It's just another one. No big deal.
Not that that's necessarily wrong - I'm definitely sympathetic to the argument that the personal is political. But that argument would justify more technical communities taking political stances, not fewer.
If, however, some community members wish to do that, they open to others the option to speak their minds on the topic, including stating that such an action ought not to be taken because no such gender exists. Contrast this with how most "codes of conduct" are written: they would permit community members to speak in favor of such a decision but not against it, as doing so would be "hateful", "bigoted", or "exclusionary".
A) sane and professional communities just don’t talk about irrelevances like this at all, which is my point
B) if some fringe political belief rejects some standard bread-and-butter assumption, it’s not really useful to describe running with the default assumption as “political”
“If abolishing private property is politics, then surely locking your door is politics.”
By this implied definition of political, more or less any human social interaction is political in the broader view.
[0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
Maybe you had a particular bad experience after someone mistook your behaviour as trolling - not that you would have been ... I just haven't witnessed any bad behaviour in the community yet - either towards myself or others.
If anything, I have appreciated at how much support the informed members are giving to the relative newbies like myself. Not only in advice but listening without ridiculing if the speaker is not that knowledgeable on the topic of conversation.
@jasondclinton, I agree with you in regards to the bad experience the actix project owner got in regards to unsafe code use. It was sad to see that happen to an open source contributor (or anyone).
For example, I was looking for GraphQL ClojureScript libs a few days ago, and found a thread where the first answers were essentially:
- "If you can’t find a framework that does it, chances are it’s so easy to do in Clojure/ClojureScript that nobody bothers to put an abstraction there"
- "Datomic has been doing what GraphQL offers plus much more since like 2013"
Both answers are a bit cultish. The first suggests a lack of enlightenment. The second suggests that salvation can be found by embracing the cult even further and locking yourself into a proprietary database invented by Clojure's author and used almost exclusively by Clojurists.
(Edit: This thread was from 2017. Such answers may have become more rare since then.)