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Comment by cogman10 | Hacker News Reader

> incendiary responses to rust criticism can be

I've not experienced this. Do you have examples of the rust community flaming someone for having negative opinions about the language?

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Based on what I've seen, various forms of censorship and suppression are often employed in such cases, rather than outright "flaming" or other discussion-based approaches.

It really depends on where and how the discussion is taking place, and what censorship methods the website/platform/medium involved offers.

Sometimes users are just outright banned or shadow-banned, if those happen to be options.

Sometimes forum threads, bug reports, or comments are deleted.

Sometimes the discussion remains accessible, but is stifled in some way. This includes closing/locking forum threads or bug reports, or otherwise severely limiting participation in such discussions to a very small and isolated group of people. If down-voting/reporting systems are present, sometimes they're used to limit the visibility or prominence of such discussion.

Ok, do you have a concrete example of this?

I haven't rigorously tracked all of the instances I've seen of this happening over the years, but I've tried to quickly find some more prominent examples for you.

This bug report, for example, has various "This comment has been minimized.", "rust-lang deleted a comment from ...", "rust-lang locked and limited conversation to collaborators" interference:

https://github.com/rust-lang/team/pull/671

A Reddit thread discussing the situation from that bug report mentioned above has numerous "[removed]" comments and down-voted comments:

https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/qzme1z/moderation_tea...

When Rust is discussed here, it's common enough for reasonable and relevant Rust-related comments to be voted down, sometimes severely. These threads have some examples I quickly found via a search of high-activity Rust submissions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24334731&p=2

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24343867

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23802674

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26812047&p=2

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29488336

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11340100

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24337001

Here's an example of a recent submission on this site for an article very reasonably and thoroughly questioning Rust. It got some attention, and now it's currently marked as "[flagged]":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40091427

Keep in mind that strict "moderating" (ie, censoring) has been an integral part of the Rust community's identity for many years now via its Code of Conduct and Moderation Team -

https://www.rust-lang.org/policies/code-of-conduct

https://www.rust-lang.org/governance/teams/moderation

Thank you very much for digging these up. I don't have anything more to add these are good examples of bad behavior.

Not parent, but take a look at these:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32117148

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39641552

These threads are absolutely painful to read. The Rust community/leadership would not do anything about it because Rust thrives on such "devotion".

Damn, that second one is excruciating to read. I wonder if they're aware of how they put people off the Rust ecosystem with their rabid defensiveness.

Check this response to the article within these HN comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40177534

Not actually flaming but quite condescending towards the article writer. Not even properly reading the article and coming to conclusions.

This is on HN which is generally more neutral towards Rust. I imagine in Rust circles these types of responses would come out a lot more.

I'd go read their mailing list and Reddit forms; especially when people run into issues doing stuff that's very simple in other languages. Never seen a more toxic programming community.

Hopefully they calm down, or really get drown out, once there are a real number of jobs for people using Rust. Right now the evangelists outnumber the rank and file who are just using a language to get work done.

I'm active on both and have not seen this behavior.

In fact, my experience has been the polar opposite, the rust community has been very friendly and accepting of critique.

So again, I'm going to ask for an example of rust language fanatics frothing at a criticism. If it's such a community problem this should be easy to find correct?

Here's the OPs article on /r/rust and it's both got a fair number of up votes and the top comments are all really positive towards this article. That's what I've seen at typical in the rust community.

https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1cdqdsi/lessons_learn...

It may not be flaming, but the author brings up a particular quote repeatedly. "You just don't get it/have enough experience with it yet."

I've seen this everywhere. This is an obnoxious, lazy thing to say to someone. It's a go to for many "enlightened" languages that have small ecosystems and something to prove. The only response is to ignore it entirely or, like the author did, dedicate years of your life just to see if there's something to it. This is not okay. Life is short, and we lean on other developers experience to keep us from wasting our time.

If someone posts a topic wondering if X language is bad for something, it's an earnest question. Not a time to flex your dedication to the cause.

If it helps, they can't possibly be as toxic as Lisp programmers used to be, where more or less any online conversation would start with someone new asking a question and Erik Naggum replying that they were a moron who should die.

Why is it that, say, C programmers, as such, don't get painted according to what has historically gone on in the comp.lang.c newsgroup?

Probably because there's so many more of them. Maybe because being called not a real UNIX programmer feels different from being called a Blub programmer.

Maybe I should ask: why should someone interested about Lisp today have to hear stories about some Erik Naggum who posted to a Usenet newsgroup, and died 15 years ago?

Let's assume that the newsgroup is important. Legendary Lisp hacker Alan Bawden posted there just last week or so. Nobody ever mentions him.

Every other one I've met in my life was nearly as unpleasant. Fewer death threats but they clearly all thought they had 200 more IQ points than you because they could write a macro. Thus the term "Lisp weenie".

In this case I think people should learn from history and that specific examples are the best way to do that. It's, like, effective pedagogy or whatever.

Supposedly Clojure people are nice though.

On the flip side, if you reveal to people that you are involved in Lisp, the experiences are varied.

All too often you get ignorant remarks, jokes about parentheses or "contents of address register", or outright ridicule.

If you say anything frank at that point, chances are good you might come off as an asshole.

Just smile, nod your head, change the subject, and never return to it.

"toxic" is also to generalize from one person / one forum, to an extremely diverse group, many which never used Usenet

Lol, I had a similar example with perl as a young teen programmer.

They've gotten way nicer.

That does not mirror my experience.

Rust hasn't had a mailing list for roughly a decade now...

[flagged]

You were flagged for no such thing.

You were flagged for a pointless quip about "woke"ness. Other people repeated more civil and reasonably argued forms of your same point about the language and its community and received no such downvotes.

No need to play martyr.

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