Fun hip dev shops can call them Rustaceans.

Stodgy old conservative shops can call them Rust developers.

Everybody is understood, everybody wins!

Is "Rust" a positive-sounding name in the first place ? It's old, decaying metal. It's like saying your favorite image editor is Gimp. It is a fine piece of software, but sounds unprofessional for native English speakers.

If someone forked GIMP, put in nicer UI styling, and gave it a more friendly name, I'm sure its adoption would be much higher...

That depends on what the "metal" is :)

If the "metal" is the existing ecosystem of languages, then the name would imply that it will slowly eat away and replace code that's been written in other languages.

Good point. The term doesn't sound good. I'd rather call myself a Rubyist or a Pythonista. What we call something matters. Presentation matters. Some geeks think they're hyper-rational, but do you turn up to a job interview in pyjamas? A new programming language should use a positive and cool name.

"Rust" is positive and cool. Job ads can just use "Rust programmer" instead of whatever cutesy demonym. I don't look at job ads often, but I don't recall seeing terms like "Rubyist" or "Pythonista" used in them.

Dunno - I think “Rustacean” sounds fine. Whereas “Pythonista” makes me think of Starbucks and hipsters (not necessarily a bad thing, but still), with “Rustacean”... I think of some solitary crab-like creature lurking in gloomy depths (literally, a “low level”)... robust, with a sturdy hard shell... content to exist without drawing a lot of attention to itself, but nevertheless a bit mysterious, intriguing.

Really, it’s a better analogy for Rust programs than programmers themselves, but associations don’t have to be exact. I see it as very much positive and cool.

I don’t think I’ve seen “Pythonista” in a job description in a while, even among pretty casual hip startup job postings. I actually had forgotten that term, but to be fair I’ve been in the Ruby world for a while. :)

I think I’ve seen Rubyist here or there, but it’s still not common (based on my somewhat extensive Bay Area Ruby job search early this year). It’s also the most standard grammatical construction, and doesn’t sound too punny or playful at all (which can be a good thing depending on the tone you want to set on your resume or job posting).

> I'd rather call myself a Rubyist or a Pythonista.

You can call yourself whatever you want. "Talk is cheap, show me the code."