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(joke in the title stolen from a redditor)
Context: some Rust kid vandalized cppreference.com today.
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this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2023
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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.
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.
A toxic community won't help you in good faith when you're running into issues, and this makes it harder to develop using a language with a toxic community.
idk, how do I contact "the community" when I have an issue in the first place? All I know of is StackOverflow, and they're honestly toxic enough to make me never ask questions there in the first place.
Yes, and answers on StackOverflow about languages that have toxic communities are worse than answers on StackOverflow about languages with less assholeish communities in my experience. As I mean it, StackOverflow posts tagged with the language (and probably even more so those posts' responses) qualify as part of "the community".
Touche. I personally found Discord users to be helpful and welcoming, but that was moreso for libraries and not languages.
Documentation is not a community though.
Yeah, but the shittiness of a shitty community will come through in documentation that talks down to you and doesn't dain to explain things properly. And then when you go and ask a question because it wasn't well explained in the documentation and get derided for asking.
Fanboys are also likely to mislead (including in documentation) by downplaying caveats in libraries and such. Documentation can end up being more like marketing speak than technical reference.
You speak of "vocal minorities", but I don't think it's quite as simple as that. Languages have cultures around them. (As do lots of other things. Video games. Hardware devices. Car brands. What have you.) If a language has a toxic community around it, it might be an indication that the people behind the language may lack the ability or motivation to maintain a better community. Or worse, that they're doing things that promote or attract the shittiness.
So, in short, I disagree with you. For one thing "everything about this language is great except its community is shitty" makes me suspicious that maybe everything about the language isn't great and it has a really fanboyish community that likes to suppress any (even legitimate) negativity. Where I have to, I use the language I have to use, but when I have a choice, a shitty community is generally a deal breaker for me.
Rust documentation, at least for std is some of the best I have seen.
Gotcha. I can't really speak to the quality of any Rust official documentation.
Whats also nice is thst you put the documentation in the code and rust automatically generates a documentation page thsts hosted on docs.rs. So it makes really easy to have good docs for your stuff. If only everyone would document their stuff perfectly. A lot of the new released stuff gets released with minimal documentation.