[dmix]

> - It has a bus/lottery factor of 1.

What was Rusts early years like? Was it one developer for the first part?

I'd imagine this is not a big deal in the early days, where the benevolent dictator is as much the language as the project itself, not all technology adoption happens on the same timelines. Matz with Ruby took a long time to become super popular, Rich Hickey with Clojure seemed to be a powerhouse even as that found quick adoption before stalling.

[fluffything]

When Rust 1.0 was released it had in the order of hundreds of developers doing work here and there.

When Rust started as a hobby project it was a one man effort, but it was also a project with ~1 user. It grew developers before actually growing users, and for a while, it had more developers than users.

[dragonsh]

Rust is design by committee with complicated and large syntax area and to solve one problem of memory safety created a mountain of borrow checker syntax and a steep learning curve.

So only time will tell if BDFL based language comes up like Linux or design by committee like language. Right now Rust is not that significant like Nim and Zig so all have a chance to come up.

Once there are substantial software written in them like C or C++ than only will know, right now among modern language only golang and Swift reached that stages as being significant systems programming language in spite of GC. Indeed I doubt if Rust will be as revolutionary as Lisp or Haskell or Smalltalk in terms of contributions for the development of compilers and language designs.

[fluffything]

Not bad for a bot, tell your master that your coherency levels are well down.

[littlestymaar]

> What was Rusts early years like? Was it one developer for the first part?

In the very beginning, it was a one-man project, but after some time it was picked-up by Mozilla research as an official research project, with several developers working on it (brson and pcwalton in addition to the language creator) and they also started a research new browser (in partnership with Samsung) using this experimental language. That's when people started to hear about Rust (and it was still very far from 1.0 at this point).

[sherincall]

Certainly. And I hope same thing happens with nim. All I'm advising against is people betting their livelihood on nim reaching critical mass before a single unexpected event happens that removes the benevolent dictator from the picture. Or at very least be aware of it and make an informed decision.

[nimmer]

While the lottery factor is concerning, also many corporate-driven languages have a similar risk: the company can drop the language or bend it out of shape to satisfy business needs. It happened many times.

[EdwardDiego]

Which languages are you referring to where it's happened many times? Racking my brains but falling short.

[renox]

Visual Basic

[neutronicus]

HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and the Browser Wars come to mind