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Comment by ecshafer | Hacker News Reader

Rust, which is a language I really enjoy, generates more social media outrage and religious wars than any other technical project I have been following for the past 20 years.

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> more social media outrage and religious wars than any other technical project I have been following for the past 20 years.

It is unfortunately wrapped up in larger-scale outrage culture than just within tech/programming circles. Rust as a community is very gay and very trans:

https://blog.rust-lang.org/2024/02/19/2023-Rust-Annual-Surve...

https://blog.rust-lang.org/2025/02/13/2024-State-Of-Rust-Sur...

To be clear I am 111% down for that as one of the Alphabet People myself lol. We just can't pretend like it isn't a factor.

Disclaimer: I realize these numbers are probably skewed high due to self-selection of people who are willing to take diversity surveys. The actual percentages are probably somewhat lower, but Rust undoubtedly has the highest concentration of any programming-language community. Zero question.

Personally I'd go with the "biggest worries graph" for an explanation as to why I avoid rust like the plague. If you have half of all respondents say that it's not used enough the corollary they seem to have derived is "let's force it everywhere so it does get used more". Meanwhile forth people are hacking away on building a gui in 300 bytes in a mailing list open since the 80s.

I know which of the two languages was easier and more pleasant to hire for - which should be impossible as I kept getting told no one uses forth.

Always enjoyed the meme that it's a syntax error without wearing stripey leggings and/or cat ears.

> Rust undoubtedly has the highest concentration of any programming-language community. Zero question.

How can you know this? What other communities even have such surveys?

I would expect this to be similar in any language. Anecdotally, I see the % of gay/trans/neurodivergent to be much higher in the dev community than the general population, so the numbers don’t look strange to me.

Perhaps it’s more vocal or more visible, but that would require much more analysis to enquire about cause and effect.

> Perhaps it’s more vocal or more visible

If a tree is felled in a forest and the logger doesn't tell you she's trans, does it make a sound?

“The majority of those who consider themselves a member of an underrepresented or marginalized group in technology identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or otherwise non-heterosexual. The second most selected option was neurodivergent at 46% followed by trans at 35%.”

Out of 14.5% of the respondents. I wouldn’t call that a very anything community.

It's very enough that the Rust foundation originally refused to publish the numbers lol https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/vhvb4m/2021_annual_su...

> The actual percentages are probably somewhat lower, but Rust undoubtedly has the highest concentration of any programming-language community. Zero question.

This is complete nonsense. We (LGBT) folk are pretty much equally represented in all programming communities. It's just that Rust presents as a very socially activist community, with all the attendant drama and culture war nonsense, including falsely claiming some sort of imprimatur from the LGBT folk to represent them. Cliquey hyper-online gays != the LGBT community.

Fortran, Erlang/OTP, any stack you can think of, will have LGBT devs. Common Lisp has some kickass trans devs. It's not a proliferation of rainbow flag emojis and obnoxious puerile cancel-culture politics that makes one community be 'more' LGBT than another. I won't stand for this kind of erasure of LGBT folk who don't take their assigned place in the culture war barricades.

Rust is a very neat language, but the biggest single barrier to its adoption is the Rust community, and I won't have them hijacking my identity to pretend some moral title to their constant - and deeply unpopular - online brigading, bullying, etc.

I don’t understand was to why this even needs to be a question on a language survey.

You may be misreading these numbers. It’s effectively 7-8% of the respondents who identify as non-heterosexual, which seems roughly in line with the general population (e.g. [0]).

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1270166/lgbt-identificat...

That is assuming everyone who is one of those groups first sees themselves as marginalized. imo it would've been better to not have that first question and just ask people which group they identify with.

That’s a fair point, though I would be surprised if it made a huge difference. The actual survey question was: “Do you consider yourself a member of a group that is underrepresented or marginalized in technology?” I would expect most members of a minority to consider themselves underrepresented just by virtue of being a minority. And as the choice of groups was explicitly given, I assume that the survey allowed to view the groups and then go back to answering the first question.

I'd expect that as well, but we can't really assume that.

Being a minority does not make you underrepresented. Underrepresented means there are fewer than you'd expect, given population-level numbers. In the Rust community it certainly seems true that trans people are overrepresented, though "marginalized" almost certainly still applies. The same goes for LGB, which again does not seem underrepresented in the tech community compared to society writ large, and I think many LGB people probably don't see themselves as "marginalized" in 2025, but I could be wrong.

> I would expect most members of a minority to consider themselves underrepresented just by virtue of being a minority.

I don't see why that would be the case.

And for tech in particular I'd say women (half the population) are underrepresented and LGBT (a definite minority) are not. Marginalization is a bit more complicated but similar.

at best this is a case of correlation not causation. but also given that lgbt folks are fairly common in all programming communities, i have a hard time believing these two are related and this is not something more specific to rust's culture

Please enlighten me why is this even a question on a language survey. I take many languages survey when they show up and Rust is the only one asking this.

Demographic questions are very normal on surveys.

That is understandable, perhaps keeping it to “where Rust is being adopted” good enough? What you are gaining by finding more about your demographic?

Is there any technicality in the language that benefits from extra info? I’m not asking in bad faith, I legit want to know.

It must be said that from an outsider's point a view, in quite a few aspects it very much sounds like a cult.

Get an HN article about C++, and you can be certain the comment section is going to deteriorate at some point into a religious war mentioning Rust. Get an article about Rust, and there is going to be drama in the comments.

As a programmer that could potential consider Rust, it is off-putting.

I get the opposite experience, never saw those comments chiming in Rust everytime another programming language is mentioned or pushing in to rewrite everything into Rust, but I get comments complaining about such invisible forces.

It’s like how people complain about Apple users. You see more threads complaining about how annoying those Apple fanboys are than you see actual Apple fanboys being annoying.

I mean... Every HN thread with Apple discussion is pretty annoying. It might not be annoying to you as an Apple user, but for many of us it's unbearable...

Only a Sith deals in absolutes. I think blanket statements about a group like this are harmful and generally untrue

This has been my experience too. There were a couple of years (like 2016-2018) where I saw a handful of people pushing the RIIR line, but I've seen many more people for many more years complaining about how those RIIR people are everywhere. Any time there's an article on Phoronix that mentions Rust, the trolls come out in droves to whine about how toxic the Rust community is and how they make everything political, while the only people in those threads making anything political are the anti-Rust trolls themselves.

You can also be certain when reading a Zig post you will see "Why would I use Zig over Rust?" or "Isn't Zig unsafe?"

They cant help but proselytize. Its like talking to my recent born again christian friend who cant help but steer every conversation to Christianity and reciting scripture. It's infuriating.

Though TBH it very much feels like the cult of OOP that rocked the 90's. And look where that paradigm is now ...

> Though TBH it very much feels like the cult of OOP that rocked the 90's. And look where that paradigm is now ...

It's alive and well. Sure, Java-style OOP might not be, but that's mainly because it was never sensible OOP to begin with.

A bit like "Agile is dead" and everybody hating "Agile". Sure, what they hate is what's been pushed as "Agile" for the last decade or more: ceremoniel-over-flexibility-Scrum, rigid sprints, "user story" as a synonym for "ticket", etc, etc.

Let's hope that it's just "Fauauxp" that, like Fauxgile, is about to be dead. ASAP.

Get an article about Rust, and there’s going to be comments about how drama, zealous Rust is from people that never use Rust. Regardless of its content.

So yeah, typical internet houlier than thou reactions, I wouldn’t read much into them.

> Get an article about Rust, and there’s going to be comments about how drama, zealous Rust is from people that never use Rust.

Of course: You don't have to use Rust to see this very post here on HN, and quite a few other similar ones. Are you saying people just imagine there's a lot of drama around Rust, or what? (That TFA here or in other similar posts are all lies, or outright made-up?) Because to me -- who never use Rust -- it looks like a fact.

Which is a large contributing factor to why I probably never will, either.

There's something about Rust that draws Zealots (or draws out zealotry in people). It's not at Haskell's level, but there are several culty elements for the fanatics: secret knowledge, being 'chosen' or set aside from the ignorant plebians, and an unshakable belief in a form of rapture when the language will inevitably win when everyone realizes the superiority of monads/memory safety.

They have no moral or ethical foundation that's outside of themselves. When someone presents something that looks, sounds, and feels like morality, they latch on. Cults and gangs work in a similar manner, taking advantage of that which is lacking.

Try asking a Rust zealot to give three different real world examples where someone should pick C++ over Rust, they can't do it. The zealots are literally incapable of viewing anything other than Rust as divine.

Every experience I've have with Rust people has been negative and worthless, so I view Rust as a major red flag on resumes when hiring :)

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