[Sodman]

The author touches on why it matters in the article - either you have to restrict hiring to folks who are already rust experts (much smaller hiring pool, also usually meaning higher comp expectations) - or you have to consider the cost of training new/existing staff on Rust. Rust has a notoriously difficult learning curve, especially to folks who don't have a background in C/C++. As the author mentions, you may be looking at 6+ month ramp up time until new hires can comfortably write non-throwaway tech-debt free production code. For many startups looking to iterate quickly, that's just too slow.

Conversely if you are looking to hire Java folks, you'll have an enormous pool to pick from, or if you need to train somebody in eg Go - you can do that significantly quicker than you could with Rust.

[dcow]

I was putting that argument aside because that's an argument you can make for any language and it changes depending on who you know, what circles you're in, etc. It's and externality not specific to Rust. You can say the same for Erlang, or Swift, or C#, or ...insert language that isn't JavaScript.

What I'm saying is that, disregarding the externalities, I've found Rust to be quite a boon and not inherently a bad fit for an early stage. YMMV.