[DrFlipper]

Why does Rust attract this drama, pettiness, and immaturity? It's hard to take it seriously when these public tantrums are so frequent, I can't help speculating about the potential psychological disorders of those involved, and wonder how/why Rust, in particular, is a magnet for such people.

[dagmx]

I think it’s because the project has pitched itself as one that appeals to strong ideals. Technical ideals like safety and cultural ideals like inclusion and community driven.

Because it strives to those ideals, many of the people who flock to it hold them dearly as well. So when those tenets are broken, no matter how small or big, it sows distrust.

Other languages don’t wear those ideals on their sleeves. The closest ones are zig (which categorically says that some technical aspects are non-goals) or Swift (which has the same ideals but is more restricted in scope and appears corporate led).

The problem with community led is that you have your community issues aired in public.

I’d therefore argue rust isn’t any more or less dramatic than other language projects. It’s just more public and vocal when those happen, and when it happens it goes against ideals it states which makes it worse

[professoretc]

I think it stems from Rust's emphasis on safety. The logic is, memory errors in other languages lead to people's passwords being stolen, bank accounts compromised, etc. Those are Bad Things. Ergo, programming in anything but Rust is morally wrong and makes you a bad person.

A similar thing happened in the Ruby community, I think. Ruby was advertised as a language that would "make you happy". Its fans talked about how much fun it was to program in Ruby. Thus, anyone suggesting programming in any other language was actively trying to make you unhappy and thus a bad person.

That kind of moralizing about a choice of programming language is naturally going to attract people who think in moral terms, so every conflict becomes a battle between Right and Wrong.

[kazinator]

Rust's pitch is that something is wrong with how other people choose to make computers do things, and we will single-handedly fix it.

That's the perfect setup to attract those who are born to be perpetually dissatisfied with everything in their surroundings.

Take a mentally balanced, low-drama individual such as, oh, random example, ... myself. I can make the machine stand on its hind legs and beg for a milk bone using nothing but C. I don't have a problem. I have nothing to run from. I don't blame any of my tools for anything. If I did, what would that be?

[the_third_wave]

As an "activist language" born in an "activist organisation" (Mozilla) Rust seems to attract "activist developers" who are intent on "creating a better world". Since it is close to impossible to define "better" in an objective way - every activist knows where the world should go but they all have slightly different views on where that should be - and since many of these people have built their identity around their activism and are convinced they are right and often are somewhat lacking in interpersonal skills this is a recipe for (to use a phrase often bandied about in these circles) a toxic environment. The introduction of codes of conduct was supposed to improve on these problems but in practice they have made things worse by amplifying small 'missteps' into 'serious issues'. Combine this with the presence of a number of seemingly ever-offended individuals claiming to be 'oppressed' or 'disadvantaged', some 'toxic femin(ism)inity' [1] claiming things about 'white toxic masculinity' and you quickly end up in a mire.

[1] https://archive.ph/f10KK