(joke in the title stolen from a redditor)
Context: some Rust kid vandalized cppreference.com today.
As someone who learned a lot from C++ and that now loves Rust, this annoys me.
An attitude I’ve seen a lot among software developers is that basically there aren’t “good languages” and “bad languages.” That all languages are equal and all criticisms of particular languages and all opinions that some particular language is “bad” are invalid.
I couldn’t disagree more.
The syntax, tooling, standard library, third-party libraries, documentation quality, language maintainers’ policies, etc are of course factors that can be considered when evaluating how “good” a language is. But definitely one of the biggest factors that should be considered is how assholeish the community around a particular language is.
A decade or two ago, Ruby developers had a reputation for being smug and assholeish. I can’t say I knew a statistically significant number of Ruby developers, but the ones I did know definitely embodied that stereotype. I’ve heard recently that the Rust community has similar issues.
The Rust language has some interesting features that have made me want to look deeper, but what I’ve heard about the community around Rust has so far kept me away.
I write Java for a paycheck, but for my side projects, Go is my (no pun intended) go-to language. I’ve heard nothing but good things about its community. I think I’ll stick with it for a while.
But definitely one of the biggest factors that should be considered is how assholeish the community around a particular language is.
I think all of the factors you’ve mentioned are extremely valid, but this is the one factor that I think should absolutely not count into whether something’s a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ language. If I’m choosing which technologies to use for my next project, the question of whether it has a rude vocal minority in its community is AS FAR DOWN on my list as possible. Right next to whether its name is hip or whether their homepage is engaging.
