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Comment by Lammy | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

“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...

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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