[unlinked_dll]

The author gets you with some Pharo evangelizing in there, sneaky.

I'd really like someone from the Rust community (steveklabnik?) to write a history of the language/community and what decisions they took to grow. There's social and technical stuff that got people to go out and evangelize, which is half the battle - what they've really succeeded at is getting people to listen.

[steveklabnik]

I think one of the hard things about making suggestions about how to do a thing like this is that it's unfalsifiable. I'm not suggesting that only things that are falsifiable are worthwhile, but like, let's take what you're saying here at face value: Rust was evangelized successfully. What we can't know is, could we have done a better job than we did? Did some of those choices that I or whoever else would suggest as a best practice actually harm the adoption of the language? How can we tell the difference?

[unlinked_dll]

Thanks for replying, Steve :D

I was more suggesting that there's a story about how Rust became what it is today, and the active guidance that members of the core team(s) took on to take it there. It's a story I'd like to read, that's all.

The questions you bring up are very good ones, and they're relevant to anyone developing technology like a programming language - be it a FOSS project, a creative tool, whatever. But I think from a literary perspective it wouldn't be the job of the person telling the story to answer them, but for the reader to decide for themselves.

[tasogare]

Frankly, Rust is not the example I would take about successful evanglization: the numerous Rewrite It In Rust (RIIC) posts, the ones asking on an inquisitional tone why the project haven't been written in rust, or those who changed the topic to rust in unrelated discussion (that's literally trolling) that is happening in a lot of threads here are really off-putting.

[raphlinus]

I have a "Rust Evangelism Strike Force" laptop sticker, but I will caution: the more aggressive evangelism stuff that you cite here is not coming from the core team or people who actually build the Rust ecosystem.

[unlinked_dll]

I mean my point was that it seemed to have worked. It's been awhile since I've seen RIIR posts or the dumb evangelism. More often I see comments like "this wouldn't have been a bug if you wrote it in Rust" which is usually accurate and engages compelling discussion.

[saagarjha]

> More often I see comments like "this wouldn't have been a bug if you wrote it in Rust" which is usually accurate and engages compelling discussion.

It's usually accurate, but it rarely spurs compelling discussion in my experience. Whether it's inertia or actual pigheadedness, smugly suggesting that they could have "just" rewritten their software in Rust and they wouldn't have their day ruined doesn't invite the best kind of discussion, considering that the people involved are either just coming out of the bad day or tend to underestimate the costs of switching.

[smalltalkcoder]

There's nothing sneaky about it. Right at the start of the third paragraph, it says: "I’m a Smalltalk evangelist and Pharo is one of these languages."

The author is presenting one example, and pointing to a Pharo programming competition as the key exhibit. It's a pretty impressive competition, too. Impressive prizes. Impressive competition map and Pac-Man style game.

In fact, if you look around the same blog, you'll find a nice comparison to another competition called Battlesnake: https://smalltalk.tech.blog/2020/03/03/battlesnake-the-compe.... JRMPC seems to be a cut above.