>Is your theory that rust makes people dramatic? Or that dramatic people like rust? What other options are there, if not coincidence?
There is a cognitive bias called "loyalty to the brand", in which it says that people prefer the things they have because they rationalize their choices to protect their sense of ego. When they invest time (or a lot of money) to something, they create an emotional connection, especially if that was a choice and not something imposed on it. It is choosing one thing about the other that leads to narratives about why you have done a certain thing, something that is usually connected to your self-image.
There are a number of cognitive trends that converge to create this behavior. This assignment effect appears when you feel that the things you have are superior to things you don't have.
Another bias is the fallacy of irrecoverable costs. This happens when you spend time or money on something you don't want to have or don't want to do, but you can't avoid. For example, imagine that you spent time studying Rust. You will be "hooked" on the idea that given the time spent in this, it is better to defend the language, even if you imagine that it is not for all things.
To combat post-decisional dissonance, the feeling that you committed to one option when the other option could have been better, you strive to feel justified as to what you selected to reduce the anxiety created when questioning himself. All this forms a gigantic group of neurological associations, emotions, details of self-image and trends around the things you have.
All of these are valid, but would this not equally apply to a linux dev stamping their feet and obstructing other people's work because they don't like rust?
> Is your theory that rust makes people dramatic? Or that dramatic people like rust?
Both, really. As a language that was designed from the ground up to be a replacement for C and C++ (thus implying that it's superior to these established languages), it positions itself as inherently "dramatic" and anti-establishment.
This obviously attracts these political activist types who love to insist that their way of thinking is the way forward, that everyone else was simply doing it wrong before they came along, and that anyone who questions their beliefs is an obvious enemy of progress who should be silenced at all costs. It's a cult, basically.
I think the second one is more likely. People choose languages and ecosystems which fit their way of thinking so naturally, the ecosystem shifts to that direction. This is a self-reinforcing loop :) (one can naturally see this in many languages when the language advocates say "you are just holding it wrong...")
I'm inclined towards the second explanation. But whatever the case may be, there really is an unusually high amount of drama in the Rust community. Maybe Rust just attracts really passionate nerds with a lack of social skills, IDK. But there's something going on there.
I think it is a human trait to like to win arguments. In some card games, there is a thing called a trump card [1]. The trump card has this special ability to beat all other cards.
Rust has a kind of trump card: memory safety. If you get in an argument about code it is often possible to maneuver the argument in the direction of memory safety at which point the Rust advocate gets to default win the discussion.
I think this "trump card" aspect attracts a particular kind of person to advocate for Rust simply because they like to feel technically superior to others. Whenever they are in an argument, no matter what the context, they simply have to play the game: how can I make this technical argument about memory safety so that I can win by default.
This perspective just shifts the problem one meta-layer up: one side (Rust advocates) considers compiler-enforced memory safety to be a trump card, while the other side does not. So side A is "right" because they have the trump card who they played, but side B is also "right" in that they don't consider the stupid card that side A played to be a trump. The rest is drama.
Thus, instead of drama, we get meta-drama, i.e. nothing has changed.
Is your theory that rust makes people dramatic? Or that dramatic people like rust? What other options are there, if not coincidence?