> Rust wants to be a widely used language

I am sure they want that. But so many responses of Rust enthusiasts to any article/blog less than flattering get very aggressive. May be Steve Jobs got away with 'You're holding it wrong' but I doubt incoming users for Rust will be this kind.

The aggressiveness is unfortunate (and counterproductive), but comes from the understandable perspective that too much bad press could kill the language before it even gets off the ground.

The Rust thesis is: "You should care about all these things you don't currently care about, and Rust helps (makes) you care about them." In order to enjoy Rust, you need to thoroughly buy in to that idea. Any significant deviation from that thesis defeats the very purpose of the language.

But of course most people aren't going to buy in, because it's an idea predicated on making their lives harder (in the short term) than it currently is. Rustaceans believe the long term benefits are massive, but new users cannot possibly believe that except by taking it on faith. This creates a conflict. The Rustaceans need everyone to give the language faith over an extended period of time, and anyone giving up their faith after a short trial not only drops out of the ecosystem themselves, but possibly damages the faith of others. That's a huge problem, because Rustaceans are hoping their language will one day take over a significant portion of the systems/embedded development space. That can't happen if people sour on the language so quickly. So when Rustaceans see someone slam their language with giving it an "honest try," they get upset because the damage done is palpable.

Of course, that's the wrong strategy, as it just drives people further away from the language. The right approach is to be inhumanly kind and accepting so that the frustrations are counterbalanced by support. The good news is that the Rust community at large seems to be quite nice; it's just the angry ones that show up in blog comments.

Honestly, Hacker News is too general to base your opinion of the "Rust community" on, try #rust-beginners on irc.mozilla.org or users.rust-lang.org and I think you'll find one of the most welcoming communities on the internet.

When the blub programmers look up the ladder, they see a bunch of type theory, monads, and laziness. They don't see the use for these features as they think in blub.

If you tried to teach basic arithmetic in elementary school by means of axiomatic set theory, you'd put entire generations of people off of math. It is not a virtue to require people to take the hardest path to a concept in the name of purity, and it is certainly not a virtue to be condescending in the failure of others to do so.

Take as an example call/cc. If I tried to explain that to a--as you put it--blub programmer, I would probably get glazed eyes in response. If I instead tried to explain it via means of a yield operator (à la Python), I would much more likely get someone who could think of use cases where they would want to use it in their own code. The limitations are not in the blub programmer, it's in the teacher for assuming that blub programmers are incapable of learning hard concepts.

The type system in Haskell and other ML family languages is incredibly powerful, but it takes a long time for most to intuitively grasp functors, monads, monad transformers,...

It's a huge entry barrier.

Exactly what I rail against in Rust. What do you see when you toss a coin friendo?