I think I hit a nerve with this one. If you put out a job ad for any mainstream language (Java, JavaScript, C++, among others) you're inundated by applicants who have no business even working in this industry. If you put an esoteric language like Elixir or Rust, you get a smaller but much higher quality pool of applicants. That's my personal experience, I don't have hard data to back it up. Paul Graham once wrote about this effect in his Great Hackers essay [1].
Of course, the flip side of that is with a smaller pool of applicants, filling the position may not be any easier. It is harder to hire a poor candidate though.
John Carmack has actually played around with Rust. But I would like to reiterate that when generalizing about a population based on statistics, you might be correct more often than you'd be wrong (.e.g. men are more aggressive than women) but you can still easily find individuals who are exceptions. That you can find an exception doesn't disprove the rule. You still have to treat people as individuals, and not as a population. That should go without saying.
It does tend to grate on people when you have developers from a certain community going and calling anybody that doesn't agree with their "One True Way" inferior and not loving their craft. This is literally the No True Scotsman fallacy to a tee. You're essentially saying, "Only a true programmer that loves their craft would use Rust. Clearly if you're not using Rust, you're not a true programmer". Yeah, sure.
I'll say this for the millionth time, I've seen great code in C++, I've seen terrible code in C++. I've seen great code in Python, I've seen terrible code in Python. I've seen great code in Typescript, I've seen terrible code in Typescript. I personally don't look at Rust code, but I'm willing to bet that there's great Rust code, and terrible Rust code. It turns out, the language is not the variable in this equation, it's the developer.
> That's my personal experience, I don't have hard data to back it up.
So, statistically speaking, you're making this up out of thin air.
> That you can find an exception doesn't disprove the rule. You still have to treat people as individuals, and not as a population. That should go without saying.
Exactly, which is why saying something like:
>> People learn C++ in college. People learn Rust because they love their craft.
Is such a radical statement. I don't see people from other programming language communities talk like this. It's amazing to me that people from the Rust community think saying things like, "If you don't learn Rust, it must be because you don't love your craft" is a verifiable fact.
I know it's a crazy thought to have, but maybe, just maybe, people can like different things...?
No, if you're paying attention, what I'm saying is there is no financial incentive to learn Rust, it's not going to help land you a job. You won't learn it in college, you won't learn it at work. So if you know Rust it's because you enjoy your craft enough to invest your own time in learning it just because you're curious about it. So given no other data points, I can guess that the Rust programmer is better than the C++ programmer and be right more often than not. That's not a radical statement, it's pretty intuitive when you think about it. It's not specific to Rust either. I can say the same of any esoteric language. When I see languages like that on a resume, that's a positive signal, even when hiring for C++.
It sounded like they were saying "both pools have a lot of qualified applicants, but C++ has incentives to draw an additional flood of un/under-qualified applicants that haven't started to apply to Rust yet".
Of course, the flip side of that is with a smaller pool of applicants, filling the position may not be any easier. It is harder to hire a poor candidate though.
John Carmack has actually played around with Rust. But I would like to reiterate that when generalizing about a population based on statistics, you might be correct more often than you'd be wrong (.e.g. men are more aggressive than women) but you can still easily find individuals who are exceptions. That you can find an exception doesn't disprove the rule. You still have to treat people as individuals, and not as a population. That should go without saying.
[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html