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Comment by olzhasar | Hacker News Reader

I was very excited about Rust prior to the LLM-era. I never managed to dive deep into it due to the lack of time, but was really planning to.

Nowadays when everyone and their dog are either vibe-coding with Rust or constantly shouting about it's superiority, I've lost any interest in the language. I'm learning Zig.

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Feel the same way about the intersection of Rust evangelists and vibe coders. The amount of undeserved arrogance by some hardcore believers is toxic to their culture. I am learning Rust, because there is merit to the language itself, and there are some useful and quality codebases written in it. But it's imperfect in various ways, most of all the evangelists attacking other languages as inferior and unsafe, and the increasingly common massive vibe-coded monstrosities. It's not that I'm against the use of LLMs, I'm against bad engineering practices and unmaintainable code.

Zig, on the other hand, is a breath of fresh air. There's so much to love about it, including language design that values clarity and simplicity, and the cross-compiler which is how I got started on it, by using Zig as a better build system for C projects. Their move away from GitHub and vibe-coded contributions is also commendable, it's more reason I trust their sensible judgement.

Interesting choice when LLMs remove one of the biggest barriers to entry for Rust which is you have to know almost all the rules to reliably make valid changes to Rust programs (which also helps LLMs at inference time when they make mistakes).

>when everyone and their dog are either vibe-coding with Rust or constantly shouting about it's superiority, I've lost any interest in the language

None of this makes Rust worse as a language

What? This doesn't make sense, how is it Rust's fault if people are being lazy and tribal?

It's not the fault of the language itself. But the behaviour gives people bad vibes, and they don't want to associate with the community anymore.

Keep in mind. Learning a language usually also means you interact with the people in the ecosystem at some point.

The community seems normal? Take this popular thread for example:

https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1tcrmjs/rewrite_bun_i...

Many seems to be very skeptical and concerned about Bun being vibecoded.

The rest of the subreddit is basically people showing off their work.

It's not about if the entire community is weird. But that a few vocal people doing something becomes the first impression of the ecosystem. Which is turning people off from exploring further, as you can see in this thread.

You can make the case that if something like this turns you off from diving deeper into the language you probably weren't that motivated to begin with. But it is a noticable effect. This post isn't the first time I see it either. Rust has become a meme amongst my colleagues because things keep popping up with "Build with Rust" before mentioning anything of substance of the project. The phrase "Did you know Rust is memory safe?" is also a running joke in my IRL dev surroundings now.

I mean, yeah... but I bet if Zig gets really popular, it will attract similarly toxic weirdoes.

Also if we're only judging whole communities by their toxic minorities, then... I'm so sorry Americans reading this, I've got some bad news for you, lol

What I'm trying to say is, it's best to try <a thing> for yourself, and see if it fits your preferences, rather than letting others stop you from exploring.

I don't think anyone's disagreeing with you that it's "best", but people are stubborn, irrational beings at heart.

> What I'm trying to say is, it's best to try <a thing> for yourself, and see if it fits your preferences, rather than letting others stop you from exploring.

Yes, that is the rational thing to do. I don't think anybody disagrees with that. But that's not how a lot of people go throughout their day. There are a gazillion languages to pick up nowadays, and I think many experienced devs only have a casual interest in picking up a new one. If you've been interested in picking up a system language, I can easily see why you would steer away from Rust towards Zig.

And just to clarify here. You shouldn't judge an entire community based on their toxic minority. But as a community, you can't also ignore your toxic minority. Like it or not, they do represent you. And they do scare away potential newcomers who aren't already sold on the language.

Rust is definitely a hotbed for the kind of smells/red flags I used to associate with C++ Template Demons. "I typed every line myself" ok and?

> I used to associate with C++ Template Demons.

Reminds me of a colleague who rewrote the entire standard template library from scratch to demonstrate his uber-templating knowledge. He was the only one who could debug problems in that. The rest of us were ordinary c++ coders.

I've always found juniors to be the most prone to being "clever". Writing complex things for the sake of it. And it's one of the things I think you need to get over if you want to be considered medior/senior. A senior that loves being clever in an actual product is dangerous. Keep that stuff for hobby projects.

At a web agency I used to work at this was definitely a thing we had to teach the juniors. Whatever you built now is going to end up in maintenance with a support team that doesn't have as deep of an understanding of the project. Being overly clever now is going to be a pain in the ass later.

"Keep It Simple, Stupid" is an important skill for a professional.

> if people are being lazy and tribal?

I have seen developers and managers having an attitude of arrogance just because they happen to code in a specific language. They also look down upon other developers just because they happen to code in some other language. Evangelism combined with arrogance is toxic.

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