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Comment by kouteiheika | Hacker News Reader

> when they seem eager to follow whatever the most current thing is?

Rust hit 1.0 *10 years ago*. How many more years will it take for people to stop constantly insinuating that people only use it because of the hype, and not simply because it's a vastly better language than C?

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My problem has nothing to do with the language, I think it’s wonderful. But people who are Rust evangelists push the language everywhere, regardless of it’s appropriate or if the maintainers actually want to use it. So yes, most people who advocate it for everything are mainly doing it due to hype rather than its benefits. Especially when people act as if it’s a morally wrong not to use Rust. 10 years isn’t long at all for a language.

I’ve seen this sentiment be expressed often but I don’t see any merit behind the argument.

It boils down “this language may have merit but I don’t like the way people advocate for it”. That’s just tone policing. And the thing about tone police is that the standard they set is vague/nebulous and therefore impossible to satisfy.

You have some “right way to advocate” in mind. Other tone police have some other “right way”. But advocates aren’t mind readers, nor can they satisfy all your demands simultaneously.

> push the language everywhere, regardless of it’s appropriate

Where is the language inappropriate? Notice you don’t say, so while it sounds like you’re making a technical argument it sounds like a pensioner whining about kids on his lawn.

That’s all this really boils down to. The whiners don’t have any technical arguments, they’re just old conservatives who like the way things have always been and want to keep it that way. In place of technical arguments they say silly things like “of the millions of rust developers out there, I didn’t like a few comments made by some of them”. Cool.

The fact that you accuse everyone who disagrees with you of being “old conservatives” makes it obvious that you come from a place of so much bad faith that I want nothing to do with you or give any credence to any argument you have. This is a prime example of how rust evangelist treat not using Rust as a moral wrong and why Rust developers are insufferable. I rather write in a supposedly suboptimal language than dealing with those like you.

Haha, in other words, you object to my tone. Got it.

See, you’ve proven my point perfectly. You’re incapable of making a technical argument so you focus on the tone - “evangelist”, “bad faith”, “insufferable”.

> I rather write in a supposedly suboptimal language than dealing with those like you.

To be clear, you can download the compiler for free and write all the programs you like while interacting with 0 people. You’re talking to me because you’re on HN, not because you’re writing Rust. Isn’t that obvious?

Tone is important. You are insufferable. I am 21 years old and would also rather write C and hang around the "old conservatives" than be in a community of people who talk about others the way you do.

Let’s be clear about what I’m calling out. I prefer to keep technical discussions technical. Let’s talk about technical merits like performance, security, maintainability, ease of learning. All of these are valid parameters to judge a technology.

“I don’t like the way some people speak” is not a technical reason and has no place in a technical discussion. It’s especially meaningless because no one can possibly like the way every person in a group of millions speaks.

A person who eschews technical discussion in favour of tone policing is not a person whom I take seriously. If you want to hang out with and learn from such people I wish you luck. Your age doesn’t matter. A 20 year old can have their thinking ossified just as much as a 60 year old.

Partly because some of its advocates say things like:

> it's a vastly better language than C

when they could just say "it has some important features that C does not have and likely will never have".

I don't follow. So you think it cannot be possibly a vastly better language than C, and the only reason people are saying that is because of the hype?

"Better" implies an unambiguous "goodness" metric, which does not exist. People who still use such language are thus implying that their opinion and their definition of "good" is the only correct one.

Honest answer: when the first adherents of it are fully retired, so we can truly see if it has staying power with the next generation of engineers. C has passed this test.

Rust is supposedly post-1.0 but it still doesn't have a standard that isn't just documenting the output of the compiler.

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