C++ was also very popular and fashionable at some point. It also promised better type safety and better memory management than C. Now, 20 years later, it's easy see that C++ didn't deliver on all of its promises about better abstractions and object oriented productivity gains. RAII promised to make race conditions, memory leaks, and use-after-free bugs a thing of the past. The C++ hype was relentless and a very loud minority argued every C project should really adopt C++. Thankfully, a handful of grouchy naysayers stuck with C.
Fashion and hype has always played a big role in software and our industry has at times unwisely abandoned good technology in favor of the 'New hotness'. We gyrate between local apps and cloud apps, thin and thick clients, static and dynamic typing, micro-services and monoliths, relational databases and keyval stores. Our industry is not very rational and the best tools don't always win. Marketing and market effects (winners keep winning) play a big role.
Recognizing the role hype plays in our industry is not myopia.
I would not take the time to add my little voice to the ones that express their exasperation with rust, if not for the scornfull tone of your message.
We all know that rust has a lot of merits, in that it is trying to establish a different, ambitious new trade off wrt. safety ganranties vs expressive power, and as a result is one a the few serious contender to replace C++ in the very areas where C++ is king, trading just a bit of performance for a vastly more sane language and better static garanties.
But it is also fair to acknowledge that more often than not, in the many "old_thing but in rust" that are being posted on HN, the old_thing at hand does not actually fall in that very important but also very small subset of programs that can not tolerate automatic memory management.
In other words, rust was not the good choice from a technical stand point.
Maybe it's particularly obvious to me because I have tried to promote rust before it became cool? At that time my coleagues could only tolerate Python or Go. These days the same people probably program in rust (or are at least considering it), and that's not because rust improved that much, or because they have sudenly learned to use the right tool for the job.
I will keep calling this attitude negative and disrespectful, because it's belittling other people's work, curiosity and experimentation.
A lot of the things being posted in HN are not products but rather small-to-mid-size programs written by (quite often) experienced developers trying out a new language and somehow managing to scratch theirs or someone else's itch. On top of that, they are learning and we as a community are also learning from their hits and their misses.
A lot of things, such as WASM frameworks, are heavily experimental, and in this very thread there is an example of an author of those saying they're back to working JS. This is fine.
I would be totally fine with comments like "Rust is not good for this" or "Go is not good for that", and I have given some examples myself above. But this is clearly not what's happening here. It's ok to not want to participate on something, but the vitriol and flamewar-bait on those topics is not that.
Well, I agree to all of that, I just don't read the same thing as you do in those critiques. To me, they do not sound like belittling authors who post here (frankly, of all languages that are used just because they are trendy, I much prefer that it's rust than any of the many runtime typed evaluated languages that used to be popular in the past).
To me the actual target of those critical comments are not the projects at hand but rather that trend in our industry to let popularity lead our decisions, and how easily we form small chapels that fight each others instead of encouraging learning and practicing several competing techs.
Not that it will change anything, though.
It's worse: the target is always the people, not even the projects. It would be fine if there were any actual criticism, but it's just name calling all the way.
And the top level comment about "cool kids" I answered to definitely doesn't have the nuance you suggest it has, nor does the flagged comment comparing it to a religion, or the comments calling people "hipsters". And this thread here is actually better than average.
As someone that was around for the C++ hype, it was designed as TypeScript for C, and many of the reasons why it didn't deliver was exactly those C refugees that kept writing C code, but now with a C++ compiler.
It is no different than those folks, now 20 years later, that adopt Typescript, but really the only thing they do is to rename the file extension, and keep writing plain old JavaScript as always.
Fashion and hype has always played a big role in software and our industry has at times unwisely abandoned good technology in favor of the 'New hotness'. We gyrate between local apps and cloud apps, thin and thick clients, static and dynamic typing, micro-services and monoliths, relational databases and keyval stores. Our industry is not very rational and the best tools don't always win. Marketing and market effects (winners keep winning) play a big role.
Recognizing the role hype plays in our industry is not myopia.