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Comment by tikhonj | Hacker News Reader

"Popularity is the only thing that matters, and Rust is not popular enough."

What a fundamentally narrow and depressing point of view.

"Nobody gets fired for IBM" should not be an aspirational sentiment!

And the top comments take the first part axiomatically and only disagree on how (un)popular Rust is.

Lots of ideas and technologies can be useful and successful without becoming massively popular. There's a reason we don't all eat McDonalds and listen to Pop music.

So why shouldn't we expect the same from different ways of thinking about and practicing programming? It's clearly possible to be productive and effective in "unpopular" languages—I've seen it first-hand with OCaml and Haskell teams, and secondhand with lots of other tech—so why not encourage that? I'd rather have an industry that values good taste than slavish trend-following, thank you very much.

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> What a fundamentally narrow and depressing point of view.

I want to get work done. Not be a part of some "software taste revolution." If you can't help me get my work done you're not on the list.

It's your point of view that is narrow. If popularity is not material then the loss of a single developer will have no impact and Rust will be the same as it ever was. Otherwise popularity matters and you should endeavor to observe and catalogs Rusts shortcomings so they can be addressed.

> If popularity is not material then the loss of a single developer will have no impact and Rust will be the same as it ever was

If lots of articles are written saying that popularity is all that matters, then people will start believing it, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. That's the narrowness.

> then people will start believing it

I don't subscribe to this philosophy. People will repeat it in certain contexts to avoid sounding out of touch and incurring social bullying but I have genuine doubts that their beliefs can be so easily manipulated.

> and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy

If you do believe this then your answer is just to write a bunch of articles in the opposite direction. It's a gross sort of world to accept living in; though, this is probably why I hold the belief I've espoused above.

And Open Source was founded on the ideals of proper engineers, not getting a paycheck and clocking out ASAP.

ironic to call someone's POV narrow just becasue it disagrees with your worldview.

>I don't subscribe to this philosophy. People will repeat it in certain contexts to avoid sounding out of touch and incurring social bullying but I have genuine doubts that their beliefs can be so easily manipulated.

We had an entire election where a state was bought with votes, admitted it was a scam, and is using the courts as a cost of doing business. Beliefs can in fact be manupulated more easily than you expect for the common people.

Rust is extremely popular and is only getting bigger with every passing year. It's got incredible velocity and is about to break into the TIOBE top ten.

The Rust critics can't stop other people from using and enjoying it. It's unstoppable at this point.

> For higher level stuff (e.g.: web backends) Go offers faster iteration cycles than Rust

Rust is excelling in this space and in so many other use cases it was never originally imaged for. Have you seen the Actix/Axum adoption? It's insanely popular, and it's such a nice and low defect rate language to write web endpoints in. It's actually highly productive in this use case.

> Yes, Rust adoption is rising but competing technologies are also getting better

Other languages are not "catching up" on competing with Rust. Adding sum types is great, but that won't deliver the same benefits. Rust features make it fit into a truly unique space.

> a big push in advancing programming languages was the support of big corporations

No big companies using Rust? All of the big companies are using it!

> the first rule of Rust jobs is that no one talks about Rust jobs

There are Rust jobs! I'm hiring Rust devs.

> It's insanely popular, and it's such a nice and low defect rate language to write web endpoints in. It's actually highly productive in this use case.

I concur. Lots of folks here and elsewhere will make claims about how Rust isn't a good fit for this space because _it's a systems language_ or because the iteration cycle is too slow and it isn't meant to replace Python/JavaScript/whatever, anyways. To that, I call BS. It's (objectively) a general purpose programming language and can be used to do whatever you need it to.

To your point, I've also found it extremely productive for web development. Even if it does require more work up front, that's (usually) work you're not doing on the back-end chasing and squashing bugs or trying to cover corner cases which you hadn't accounted for -- but the Rust compiler would have.

> "Popularity is the only thing that matters, and Rust is not popular enough."

This is unfair to the article, when the actual focus is on finding a job and paying the bills.

It doesn't have any of moral bankrupcy of the "Nobody gets fired for IBM" situation, where we'd be enabling corrupt companies because everyone else is also turning a blind eye.

If the post had just been "I'm doing C++ instead of Rust because I could find a C++ job but not a Rust job", that would have been totally reasonable and I would not have said anything. But that was not what the rant was saying—otherwise it would have been boring and not made it to HN and /r/rust.

> What a fundamentally narrow and depressing point of view.

Maybe not for you HN patricians, but most regular people in the world want stability and have other immediate priorities far above becoming a programming language revolutionary.

well yes. But that's why I'm here and not on Twitter or Tiktok. To seek curiosity, share knowledge, and overall hope to better oneselves.

I'm not surprised to see this mentality because this is also ultimately a place to foster entrepreneurs, who revolve around money. But it's still saddening to see curiosity be mocked.

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