I'm a big fan of open source software and have tons of respect for any OSS developer, regardless of the software he/she develops.
But I have to say, as a developer who has been taking part in the OSS scence for the last 20 years, it is very strange to me that some developers feel obliged to indicate they wrote a piece of code with Rust.
If I'm a user, I care much more that this is a usable software than what kind of programming language was used. For all I care, write it in binary.
Rust may be a great programming language, but it is only a mean to an end.
I can think of several ways this is useful to know:
1. As OSS software, some users will want to edit the code and add features, and knowing what language it’s written in is a pre-requisite to doing that.
2. The developer community is an important factor in making OSS projects successful. If I’m going to take a chance on a young project, I want to know that it is set up to have a strong community and continue to be improved over time. If it was hand-written in binary or assembly as you suggest, there is no chance it would grow a popular community of developer contributions.
3. Like it or not, different programming language communities have developed around different values in how to build software. The Rust community generally promotes strong type safety that makes entire classes of bugs much less likely which is a plus to me as a user.
4. With editors in particular, the language it’s written in often leaks into the user experience. E.g. Emacs is written and configured in Lisp, Vim has a ton of legacy cruft in the C and vimscript codebase that can make it annoying to compile/install, annoying to build plugins for, and has made modern features like asynchronous tasks difficult to add, which was the whole reason for neovim existing. VSCode has plugins written in JavaScript. Knowing this project is written in Rust gives me some hints that it probably won’t share any of these similarities with these other editors.
But I have to say, as a developer who has been taking part in the OSS scence for the last 20 years, it is very strange to me that some developers feel obliged to indicate they wrote a piece of code with Rust.
If I'm a user, I care much more that this is a usable software than what kind of programming language was used. For all I care, write it in binary. Rust may be a great programming language, but it is only a mean to an end.