This is how most devs feel about any language they don't already use. There are even HNers who regularly brag about having never taken Javascript, one of the most ubiquitous languages, seriously enough to build a nontrivial project or to appreciate its upsides.

So it's not as damning as you seem to suggest.

For web dev, the ecosystem isn't quite there yet. I've written a few utilities and toy APIs, but don't feel like the web ecosystem is was rich as it needs to be for a serious project. Actix comes close. A few others like Warp ND Gotham are interesting. I'm waiting for rocket to compile in stable, and pick up async.

But yes, rust is definitely pretty cool, and I'm annoyed that I finally "understand" the language on my nth attempt at learning it, and still haven't found a good use case for it.

I’ve been thinking recently about how the symbol “C” in “C programming language” literally stands for “3”.

We out here like, “I’ve been getting really into this new language, 12,447. I think it might finally be the thing to replace 3 for me.”

Except it wasn't the third. It was like something between the 50's and low 100's. There were lots of languages then, most being unpopular.

C was just intended to be third in that very specific lineage, and I wouldn't be surprised to find it wasn't really third and just making the claim with its name.

>There were lots of languages then, most being unpopular.

Not to mention several more advanced than C, Go, or even Rust... (Lisp, for one, Smalltalk for another)

Well, it depends on what you mean by advanced, and if you're just considering the language or language plus compiler/runtime, but I take your point, and mostly agree with it.

General purpose languages are a tough sell these days. Rust is tailored towards a niche and that's OK

> Rust is tailored towards a niche and that's OK

I encourage people to try writing run of the mill blocking code with Rust instead of diving immediately into futures and thread pools and streams just as if you were writing run of the mill Python.

It's generally 1:1 equivalent to the code I would've written in another language.

It's a general purpose programming language where most of the learning curve is in more advanced topics like concurrency, streams, and how to multiplex over thread pools. You can ignore them at the start, just like you can in Python.

Systems Languages are considered niche these days?

But it's not the first systems language, so it does need to carve a niche in that space

What is Rust's niche? What excites me about it is that it is becoming a general purpose ecosystem. A few libs are missing, but that's changing rapidly.

Of course generally the ones who “don’t know it”. But then that probably holds true for all languages one does not know.

I was a big fan of Rust at first. Then they went off into a weirdo approach to functional programming. That sent Rust to the niche in which Haskell lives.

You'll have to be a bit more specific, I've been using the language for quite a long time now and I don't understand what you're referring to. I haven't noticed any obvious paradigm shift since 1.0.