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Comment by nec4b | Hacker News Reader

I have a suggestion for HN admins. There could be a thread about Rust superiority pinned to the top of HN where the Rust "brigade" could promote their chosen tool supremacy all day long and in return leave threads about other languages alone. Otherwise almost any thread about C, C++, C#, Go, Java, JavaScript,... is getting quickly derailed from Rust aficionados.

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Unfortunately your comment is doing the very thing you're complaining about. Worse, because of the contrarian dynamic (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), it got upvoted to the top of the thread, choking out all good discussion. This isn't the way to make HN better!

I'm going to mark it off topic now, which will downweight it. In the meantime, please review the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. They ask you to contact us at hn@ycombinator.com if you want to raise a question like this. They also ask you not to be snarky.

The core value of this site is intellectual curiosity, and divisive meta comments are not in that spirit. If other people are posting tediously and offtopically, the solution is definitely not to post tedious and offtopic comments with an oppositional vector. I know it's tempting, but it makes the threads worse. The solution is to post more comments in the spirit of curiosity, or (failing that) not to post.

>Worse, because of the contrarian dynamic (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), it got upvoted to the top of the thread, choking out all good discussion.

You don't it has something to do with people being fed up with almost every other programming language thread getting spammed by low quality "meta" post about a certain language superiority which are irrelevant to the discussion?

You guys don't have to convince me—I'm aware of the problem. The question is what's the solution. Creating a mirror image of the problem and upvoting that to the top of the thread is obviously not the solution.

Sure. But you have just proven with my post that you can push such content to the bottom of the thread. Why don't you simply do the same with those comments? If its to much work for you personally, maybe add something like a flag button but call it irrelevant button and posts that get too many irrelevant flags get pushed down to the bottom.

They can, and they do. You need to email them about specific instances, and they decide on a case-by-case basis. Meta complaints aren’t actionable. And there’s already an irrelevant flag: it’s called a downvote.

I don’t believe that’s contrarian dynamic. I think that’s the fact that when applied in large doses, online evangelism is indistinguishable from spam.

Have no idea how to solve that. I have never moderated online communities and that’s not my area of expertise.

To be fair, I don't mind people talking about Rust. What I dislike the most are those that don't bring anything to the table, they will just repeat the same complaints over and over again and remind you how bad of a choice C++ is. While in reality, smart people can achieve a lot with it. But yes, C++ is not for everyone and it is denfinitely not easy.

You understand it, they have lots of time on their hands waiting for their code to compile :big_grin:

> C, C++, C#, Go, Java, JavaScript

3 of those are not like the rest.

Rust evangelists rarely go (or at least do it less) after C#, Java or even Javascript threads. 10 points if you guess why.

The overaching commonality of Rust evangelism is to target C/C++. And they're probably right :-)

Find me a Go, D lang or Zig thread from this year untouched from Rust "evangelism".

Not only did you change the list of languages under discussion just now, you also included Go, which oblio specifically did not say would avoid discussions of Rust.

You’re moving the goalposts, and complaints about discussions of Rust tend to be far more annoying than the actual discussions. How dare people want to discuss related languages they enjoy? I mean, right?

Most language discussions will have people join in and discuss other languages.

I’ve spent quite a few words in this very thread discussing Go’s package manager! Should I apologize to someone? No... I think language discussions normally involve discussions of languages.

Go is frequently attacked by Rust evangelists because they feel, and they seem right, that Go is a programming language evolutionary dead end. It's a very practical language, so very popular, but based on programming language theory from 40 years ago, with a very low adoption of concepts from the last 2-3 decades.

The risk being that in 20 years we'll wake up to the Go fad and realize that many people had been writing mountains of already legacy code from day 1, 20 years before. And those mountains of legacy code will have to be maintained because nobody's going to throw away so much working code.

Both D and Zig are direct competitors for Rust so I don't understand the fuss. This tango goes both ways, it's just that there are fewer D or Zig evangelists out there, overall. But they do visit Rust threads, too ;-)

And that's not bad, cross pollination is good. Insularity is bad.

Because many Rust fanpeople came from those high-level languages, but haven't really spent any time coding in C or C++?

No, because the other ones are higher level languages, with memory management, which completely removes many attack angles.

So Rust can't use its main strength against them, safety. Instead it can only offer extra performance, and even that depends on the use case (C# and Java can be quite speedy these days, especially with good tuning).

There is barely any Rust discussed here except for the package managers discussion?

Press "Ctrl+F" and type Rust.

5 mentions and generally in passing. The rest are this sub discussion.

106 my browser says.

Not just that. A quick Cmd+F brings up this which as you might have guessed derailed into mostly tangents with little added value:

"Oh, wow. The language was complex already and this makes me avoid C++ unless it's constrained to a narrow subset (something like Google C++ Style Guide). No wonder languages like Go and Rust gain so much traction."

Yeah but that is a point about C++ complexity with Rust getting a passing mention.

All programming language discussions bring up the same points over and over again. Rust threads also always have the ignorant question "Why is the language constantly changing?".

That's orthogonal. As our root comment says, the point is that it happens more often with Rust evangelism.

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