I disagree. I believe most people accepting awards really wouldn't have done it without other people.

Actors do not win Oscars doing great performances in bad movies.

Scientists do not win Nobel prizes working alone or in bad work conditions.

I always take these appreciations at face value.

Sure, makes sense. The original argument was that an ecosystem like Python's could have been a possible substitution for Rust, as an example, and therefore it was a baseless statement. Think the analogy with yours would be an equally good screenwriter or scientific collaborator. You need one, but technically maybe not exactly the one you had.

That said, not trying to undercut anyone's appreciative statements, especially the one from OP in his repo towards Rust! Obviously people (and programming languages, for that matter) aren't simple drop-in replacements for each other in real life. You have to be inspired and empowered by them.

That personal motivation or rapport component is probably what was being missed in the post to which I replied.

And programmers build on other peoples work. If you take away Rust? Sure he could have done it. If you take away previous work? No way.

No, it sounds like TabNine is built using a feature unique to Rust, which is not the case.

Yeah, you're right. Probably I didn't get the correct linguistic context.

But you never know, maybe in another language he would have done a much better project, maybe not. Actually, in alternative universes everything would probably be different. If Python didn't exist this project would maybe not exist too, and would be at least a little different in any case, so he could have opened the full version to Python codebases too, and that applies to all other languages.