[Ukv]

> His comment was worse in that it generalized a whole lot of people

The only statement sebstefan made specified "the people who came to interview for the Rust roles of my company" and likewise for Java applicants - groups they presumably have first-hand experience with. It was jhoechtl's previous comment that generalized to "the Rust workforce".

> I disagree. It's much more likely, in my view, that newer languages will appeal to people who value the wrong things in a business, like which language they want to use for the excitement [...]

Whether your views on people who learn Rust are positive or negative, you do still seem to agree that there are factors that can cause people with different levels of experience or attitudes to programming to choose different languages.

> anyone with a long experience in trying things will know that language is very low in the list of things that help [...] The only things that really help writing software are static types and tests...

Not necessarily the syntax of the language - but languages will have design decisions and ecosystems build up around them and that can make them better suited for particular purposes. Rust's borrow checker is very effective at reducing memory safety bugs without losing performance to GC or reference counting, for instance.