[Omin]

This selection effect cannot explain Rust's standing relative to other new languages and neither can it explain why Rust's popularity (as measured by "most loved") increases over time as more and more companies are using it. Here's the history of Rust's "most loved" percentage going back to 2015

  Year - Most Loved Pct. - Rank
  2015 - 73.8%           - 3
  2016 - 79.1%           - 1
  2017 - 73.1%           - 1  
  2018 - 78.9%           - 1
  2019 - 83.5%           - 1
  2020 - 86.1%           - 1
  2021 - 86.98%          - 1

[jstx1]

I think that's consistent with my line of thinking - if in 2015 some people tried it and decided that it's not for them, they drop off from the sample and % loved goes up in following years.

Not claiming that this explains the entire increase in the percentage (I have no way of knowing) but I don't think this data contradicts my reasoning either.

[hailwren]

In order for this line of thinking to explain the statistics, either (1) Rust would have had no users over the time period or (2) more than the loved percentage of new users like the language (mean goes up).

It's pretty trivial to see that Rust adoption is increasing, so you can discount (1).

[kaba0]

How is it different than in case of every other language? Also, why not another newer language tops the list?

[pjmlp]

Clojure is the second most loved in 2021, and it isn't like every company is rushing out to adopt it.

[Aeolun]

Rust is really hard. So while people that don’t like Javascript still continue to use it, but people that don’t like Rust are likely to drop it like a brick.

[icedchai]

Rust is too painful for hobby projects, IMO. Over the years, I've worked in C, C++, Go, Perl, Python, PHP, Java, Scala, JS, Tcl, ... others I've forgotten, most professionally and well as for personal projects.

[iopq]

I've used Rust for a hobby project, it was more painful before, but they have fixed a lot of the churn issues. The ecosystem is more or less stable right now, compared to before

[ssokolow]

Matter of taste.

I find Rust perfect for hobby projects because:

1. Squashing bugs that show up after the code successfully compiles (or, in Python's case, appears to work) is a big drain on motivation.

2. The ecosystem's focus on API stability means that, once it works the way I want, the costs of ensuring "it built/ran yesterday, so it should build/run today too" will be minimized.

3. I don't have to write as many unit tests to feel I can trust it with my data.

TL;DR: Once you're on the same wavelength as the compiler, Rust is great for projects where your motivation is purely intrinsic.

(Well, that and the compiler has been constantly improving. Things especially got much better after non-lexical lifetimes landed.)

[nerdponx]

I'm a bit surprised that Rust is really the top language here. I would have expected the top ranked languages to be nowadays-relatively-unpopular languages with dedicated long-time users, like Lisp, Tcl, Perl, and APL.

Is this weighted somehow by overall popularity?

[generic-husky]

Well the second one is a LISP (Clojure), which isn't really popular (relative to more mainstream languages).

[nerdponx]

There's probably an additional layer of substantial selection bias here. But maybe that explains the effect in the first place, greybeard Tcl users possibly didn't bother to take the survey while Clojure and Rust evangelists did.