I'm really confused by your comment because the experience that I have had and in surveys of my coworkers in the Rust community has been uniformly amazing: 1) the technical discussions are always respectful, 2) the in-person conferences have clear code of conducts and the speaker panels represent the best of the engineering and human community, and 3) the community actively encourages people asking newbie questions and goes out of its way to be supportive and non-judgemental when replying.

The only counter example that I can think of is the way that the actix unsafe maintainer's behaviour was handled (brigadiering bands of Reddit evangelists flaming him for his own flaming). However, I chock that up to an anomaly caused by Reddit's toxic community and not representative of the Rust community.

I wonder which community you’re talking about. My experience is rather positive. The infamous Rust evangelization task force is just a bunch of fanbois to put in your killfile.

I’d be curious what your exposure to the Rust community has been and where?

Within the Rust reddit or forums, they specifically dissuade blind evangelism and there are often posts critical about the language that get quite a lot of traction.

Outside the main rust community, there are definitely zealots but they are usually not accepted by the larger community, and are usually called out.

I’m not saying it’s perfect, nor that there aren’t zealots who go overboard. However it’s probably one of the least toxic of the programming communities I frequent (swift, c++, Python, c# , go etc)

I think this is a combination of two things, and is true of many new programming platforms (languages, etc.).

1. If the tech hasn't made full contact with reality yet. For instance, there aren't a diverse set of large projects written in rust yet, so it's a little easier to imagine that it's perfect.

2. We should acknowledge that technology choices have a big impact on one's career. Sure, we are all software engineers that could work in a lot of environments; but we are simply more productive in the ones where we have some experience/depth. If someone is learning rust today, in many respects that's a bet, and they (subconsciously or consciously) have a vested interest in rust's success. More experienced people will usually have a more balanced risk portfolio, spread between proven tech and a few up-and-coming technologies. But for people earlier in their career, it might be a pretty major bet for them.

They’re also super weirdly political. As a not-especially-political guy I’m super turned off by all the “activism” I see coming out of the community, even where it’s totally irrelevant. I remember seeing a whole thread about how the rust mascot crab is canonically non-gender-binary or something. Wtf?

If discussing the gender of the crab is politics, then surely assuming the crab is one gender or another is also politics. The idea that you can avoid politics in anything is a lie told by people whose beliefs conform to mainstream society. What you're really asking for is everyone to agree with the mainstream view.

It's kinda like the old military policy of "don't ask don't tell" - the policy wasn't actually don't ask don't tell - the actual policy was "pretend to be straight". Guys didn't get in trouble for talking about their girlfriend.

Beyond that, as someone that doesn't care about politics, I just skip the thread. There are dozens I don't care to read about. It's just another one. No big deal.

> If discussing the gender of the crab is politics, then surely assuming the crab is one gender or another is also politics.

A) sane and professional communities just don’t talk about irrelevances like this at all, which is my point

B) if some fringe political belief rejects some standard bread-and-butter assumption, it’s not really useful to describe running with the default assumption as “political”

“If abolishing private property is politics, then surely locking your door is politics.”

If communities want to go down that road, fine, but then they need to get out of this weird limbo where some views are allowed and some aren't. That means that someone must be just as free to say, "I believe the rust crab should have a normal gender because non-gender-binary is not a thing." without getting banned or cancelled. Right now it's reverted to a very don't-ask-don't-tell-like environment where one can either speak in support of such things or not say anything at all, effectively pretending to agree just as in your military example servicemen had to pretend to be straight.

In my experience many people (unfortunately) generally feel free to disparage non-gender-binary concepts on internet communities

Maybe in other places on the internet, sure, but I was referring mostly to the code-of-conduct-gated development communities that pretend not to discuss politics while allowing specific viewpoints above others.

I can see a difference between light-hearted speculation about an imaginary crab's gender and saying that non-gender-binary people don't exist. Can you think of any reason why one of these might be allowed, while the other might not be?

I guess I can't, because they're both political statements. Politics is either allowed or not. I assume, however, you have some reason in mind, by how you phrased the question.

Interesting - well, honestly, not sure how anything wouldn't be political if discussing a crab is politics.

Not that that's necessarily wrong - I'm definitely sympathetic to the argument that the personal is political. But that argument would justify more technical communities taking political stances, not fewer.

Discussing a crab is not politics, but attributing to it a non-existent gender is intentionally contrary to most people's social beliefs (especially outside of the SV bubble) and is thus political. Calling it a normal boy or girl isn't.

If, however, some community members wish to do that, they open to others the option to speak their minds on the topic, including stating that such an action ought not to be taken because no such gender exists. Contrast this with how most "codes of conduct" are written: they would permit community members to speak in favor of such a decision but not against it, as doing so would be "hateful", "bigoted", or "exclusionary".

Don't think of it as a community being political. It's not like people pick a programming language and then suddenly one day decide to be political, in part due to their programming-language choices.

Think of it instead as "people who are political" looking for a community (not necessarily because of that community's politics, but often for orthogonal reasons, e.g. a language being relatively new and so not yet used by anything they dislike) and then those people being political about their programming wherever they land. If some percentage of programmers are like that, then just statistically, some language is going to end up with a lot of them, whether its maintainers wish to cultivate the community image as being such or not.

My first reaction was: why is a non-gender-binary crab mascot considered "political"? I'm assuming this came up incidentally in the context of its name and pronouns?

By this implied definition of political, more or less any human social interaction is political in the broader view.

It’s one example out of many where rust users bring a political topic (and yes, post-gender queer theory stuff is political) into a discussion where there’s no reason to do so except to leverage the discussion as a platform for boosting your political belief. It’s very unprofessional, very counterproductive, and a huge turn off for people who don’t have the same fringe politics.

You're right that it's primarily a social issue, but people will always try to use the state to enforce their social beliefs, so they become political. See New York City's ordinance that can cause those who won't use a made-up "pronoun" to be fined [0], undoubtedly a use of force by the state to enforce a certain set of beliefs.

[0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...

I have to say my experience with the community has been really good. Whether it be the reddit channels, discord channels or conversations with people putting rust related stuff on youtube.

Maybe you had a particular bad experience after someone mistook your behaviour as trolling - not that you would have been ... I just haven't witnessed any bad behaviour in the community yet - either towards myself or others.

If anything, I have appreciated at how much support the informed members are giving to the relative newbies like myself. Not only in advice but listening without ridiculing if the speaker is not that knowledgeable on the topic of conversation.

@jasondclinton, I agree with you in regards to the bad experience the actix project owner got in regards to unsafe code use. It was sad to see that happen to an open source contributor (or anyone).

That is how the Mozilla community works and the kind of people they attract.

This was my opinion too, might be a generalisation, yet it is the impression I and it would seem others have!

Then don't come near the Clojure community either, that's the most cultist one I have encountered.

That has a lot to do with Rich Hickey and Cognitect encouraging cultishness.

Would you care to elaborate? I'm very fond of the language but have found people to be generally pleasant. The only criticism I have is that its a pretty small community so finding fellow Clojurists tends to be hard.

(Not the person you responded to.) My direct interactions with the Clojure community have been very pleasant and helpful, and I have zero complaints there. But when searching around for common questions related to Clojure, I often run into answers along the lines of "Clojure doesn't have X because our language is so superior we don't need it", which does sound cultish.

For example, I was looking for GraphQL ClojureScript libs a few days ago, and found a thread where the first answers were essentially:

- "If you can’t find a framework that does it, chances are it’s so easy to do in Clojure/ClojureScript that nobody bothers to put an abstraction there"

- "Datomic has been doing what GraphQL offers plus much more since like 2013"

Both answers are a bit cultish. The first suggests a lack of enlightenment. The second suggests that salvation can be found by embracing the cult even further and locking yourself into a proprietary database invented by Clojure's author and used almost exclusively by Clojurists.

(Edit: This thread was from 2017. Such answers may have become more rare since then.)

The second was probably me. Sorry about that. My words reflect me as an individual who is sometimes socially challenged, not the wider Clojure community.

Ouch—I didn't link to the thread in my previous comment specifically because I didn't want to point fingers at people who were trying to help back in 2017, even if I disagree with their answers, but here you are anyway! For what it's worth, I'd rather have more people in the Clojure community than fewer, even if I don't always share the same viewpoints.

At least they don't bring politics in it.