Yeah, it's surprising. A lot of Python people are in the community too, such as Armin, the creator of Flask.

I can't speak for Rubyists, but I find it a very strong complementary skill to Python, as it allows for writing things that are impractical in Python. And Rust feels friendlier as a Python-complement than C. Especially parallel C.

Receiving a compiler error in Rust is more appealing to me than debugging a segfault or race condition in C, especially since Rust will always tell me when one exists. Or more importantly, I can feel comfortable pushing new fast low-level code to production knowing it's not a risk. There's no ambiguity. "fearless concurrency" is not just a buzzword, it's partly what makes Rust fun and practical (for me). As well as the incredibly-fast start-up time of my Rust code compared to Python.

It is also appealing for Python programmers because of the increasingly-decent support for mixing the two languages without overhead, including publishing pure-Rust packages as python modules^1

1. https://github.com/PyO3/pyo3

Steve Klabnik and Sean Griffin were both early adopters of Rust (and are now fairly visible members of the community), and I believe that helped sow the seeds of the language in parts of the Ruby community [0].

I think Rust managed to also cultivate a community that was very much like Ruby’s [1], which brought people over.

[0] cf. Klabnik’s “Rust for Rubyists”

[1] mostly being very “people-oriented” in terms of inclusivity and documentation, as well as putting effort into ensuring that the language and its tooling provide a lot of “developer happiness”

Don't forget Yehuda Katz.

Fundamentally, I don't think it should be surprising that someone who loves Ruby would look at Rust. That it's very different is the entire point! Why learn something that's extremely similar, that won't expand what you can do very much?

Anecdotal, but I've not really seen that either. It seems the majority of the ruby devs I know who aren't still doing ruby (it seems most rails gigs these days are maintence work) jumped to elixir/phoenix.

Long may that continue, elixir/phoenix is really good stuff.

Seems very anecdotal indeed - I have trouble believing that Ruby is mostly maintenance now or that a significant portion (say, >5%) of Ruby devs have switched to Elixir.

I've been in several companies that do both Rails and Phoenix. Everywhere Rails is used mostly because management doesn't want to fire loyal and good programmers who aren't interested in learning Elixir/Phoenix. A second, and very often cited reason is that their Rails app is working fine and they don't see why should they rewrite it.

Both are completely fair.

Not going to claim my anecdotal evidence is universal -- just adding a data point.