[tialaramex]

Sure, that makes a fine hypothesis. Still though, if you're right, why does Rust report 86.1% love while Python only got 66.7% ?

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#technology-mo...

Maybe the Python number is smaller because those people are working right? All the Rust programmers are just working on a fun program at home, and Python is a serious language now, you're working the 9-5 with Joe Coder?

Haskell is 51.7% though. So, I guess when I wasn't looking Haskell really exploded in boring office environments and I shouldn't expect to see any more hobbyist Haskell projects everywhere... or your hypothesis was just wrong.

Maybe it's just that Rust is new and exciting, let's look at what people want to use that they don't now, surely that'll be Rust too and we'll know it's just Hype.

Huh, that chart is dominated by Python. 30% of programmers not doing Python wanted to start.

[jcelerier]

I must say I don't really understand your points

> why does Rust report 86.1% love while Python only got 66.7% ?

I mean, because python is in practice a boring office language where the immense majority of devs have to maintain Joe Coder's 2009 Django set of custom attributes.

> Huh, that chart is dominated by Python. 30% of programmers not doing Python wanted to start.

Because people believe that if they learn python they'll instead land a cool ML job which pays 100k more than what they have ? Like, I have my girlfriend who literally does not know anything about programming ask me if I could teach her python because she saw an ad about it (for a "land a CS job in 3 months" type of thin). That necessarily causes some inertia for Python, not enough to be more hyped than rust, but enough to influence results.

[tialaramex]

Anecdotes about what non-programmers believe aren't very applicable to Stack Overflow's survey of programmers. Still though, you end up with a weird conclusion where you believe "hype" drives the Loved statistic (one based on people's real experience) but not so much the Wanted statistic (based on what they heard) when by definition that isn't how hype works.

Think about the 2016 movie "Deadpool". Deadpool is a one joke character. There are no major Marvel characters in the movie, the stakes are low, there is no connection to the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe storyline. Reynolds has played this exact character before, in a movie which nobody liked. There was inevitable fan hype before it came out, "the merc with a mouth" sells comics and those fans are going to see the movie whatever, but fans don't know anything right? But, both critics and audiences seem to have liked this movie, a lot more than its studio expected. It made a lot of money and got pretty great reviews from most quarters. Neither of those things is hype, that's called success.

The Loved result looks exactly like what I see what I talk to people about Rust. Those who haven't heard of it of course aren't looking to write Rust, for those who've only heard of it, it's on their "things to check out" list with Go, and maybe Swift but it doesn't jump out at them. But among those who've written Rust you see a spike of enthusiasm, "Hey this is really good".

When I learned Go, I filed the acquired skills away. "This may be useful in some future scenario, but I have meanwhile ceased to be employed writing TLS bit-banging code for which I thought Go would be the best option, so, never mind now"

But when I learned Rust the first thought was "I should write more Rust". I immediately rewrote the smallest interesting C project I ever published and pushed that to GitHub. Then I wrote a bunch of code to check some of my intuitions about Rust's safety when used by people who are unreasonable (misfortunate, a collection of perverse implementations of safe Rust traits). Then I started writing a triplestore, which I'd done twice before in C -- a friend and colleague left programming and went into management after his third one, so cross fingers that doesn't happen to me.