The difference between 0.000001% and 0.001% is much less important than between 0.001% and 20%. Rust has less penetration than Haskell and Erlang, and regardless of what you think of their merits, influential as they may be, none of them are factors in the software ecosystem. Languages with 10x more use and 10x more exposure than Rust disappeared with little impact over a very short period of time. Of course, Rust could become a serious force one day, as could Zig or Nim.

> The difference between 0.000001% and 0.001% is much less important than between 0.001% and 20%.

Even if your math is pretty much arbitrary, there is the big difference between having libraries and not having them, and having jobs or not having them.

> none of them are factors in the software ecosystem

It will probably disappoint you, but C and C++ aren't really “relevant factors in the software ecosystem” anymore, and they haven't been for the past two decades. It's been PHP, Java, JavaScript, and some C#, all over for the past 20 years. And Rust won't change anything in that hierarchy even in the best case scenario, neither will Zig or Nim. And that's completely fine.

Yet, Rust has reached a significant existence, which means you can build stuff without having to build all the necessary libs by yourself, you can hire people knowing it, or even people who don't know it yet but will become proficient reasonably quickly because there are tons of learning material. You can find a job at some company already using it or use it for an internal project at your current company because you can show your manager that this isn't too much of a risk. All that even if you don't live in the bay area but in Europe. None of it was possible in 2016 for Rust, and none of it is in 2020 for Nim (and Zig isn't even stable, so it's more comparable to what Rust was in 2013 or something). If everything goes well for them, it could become the case by 2025, but not today. (First, they really need to bring more core contributors to the language, as they are still mainly developed by a single lead: at this point Andrew Kelley still has authored 50% o fall Zig commits, while Andreas Rumpf is responsible for one third of Nim's. The bus/burnout factor of both languages are still pretty much 1).

Rust has a real existence that's somewhere in the vicinity of that of Elixir, Haskell, Ada, and Delphi. It's definitely alive, but it's not "the one to beat" or a major factor, even in the systems programming space, which is what I was responding to.

Then you misunderstood the comment you were responding, because it claimed Rust was the one to beat in terms of design, never in terms of market share.

I someone wanted to release a new functional programming language, it would be totally legitimate to ask how it compare with Haskell, and complain that it's a poor reinvention of standard ML, even if Haskell only has a tiny market share.

Then you misunderstood my comment because what I said was that because of its market share and age, it isn't the one to beat in terms of design, because we have no sensible way to judge how good its design is, even in comparison to other languages. The sample size is just too small, and the experiment too young.

Yes, that's what you said, and to make your point, you compared Rust to two super new languages that are still mostly developed by a single person and not being used anyware.

Then you rectified yourself, and more accurately compared Rust with Haskell and other languages. At this point you already gave up on your initial argument, because no-one would consider Haskell too small to be a proper benchmark of a new functional programming language.

Of course, as this is an internet argument, you're not going to recognize it. Now, since we are now circling back to the initial claims, I don't think this conversation is worth pursuing. Have a nice (and safe) day.

I think most people would think Haskell is too small and that we have enough experience with it to judge the merits of its design.