Craig Weber

TL;DR: Musings about "just make your own language" as a trite retort to programming language criticism and how "rewrite it in Rust" might be threatening that attitude.

I've been programming since the early 2000s. I started in PHP, and then learned Java, Python, C, and C++. In the early days especially, programming communities were super toxic. If you had questions and didn't read The Correct Textbook About The Blessed Programming Language™️, you would be berated. If you did read said textbook and it didn't address your question, you would still be berated for trying to do something outside of the instruction of The Correct Textbook (if The Correct Textbook™️ doesn't discuss it, then you don't need it, heretic!).

One of my least favorite forms of toxicity (albeit not necessarily the most toxic) was when someone would try to advocate for the need for a feature in C or C++¹, (for example, a standard build tool with dependency management). The refrain almost always included a snarky, "if you don't like The Language™️, feel free to create your own!"--knowing full well the absurdity of expecting a new programmer to master programming language design and then implement a programming language and also market it so that enough other people use it that it acquires enough marketshare that there are jobs available for using that language and also an ecosystem of libraries and tools for it--all so that said programmer can reliably build projects or address whatever other issue was lacking from the original language. And naturally I did try to make my own language a few times before realizing the investment required and how much I would need to learn to have a nonzero chance of succeeding (oh well, had fun, learned a lot!).

Anyway, skip ahead a few decades and now many in those same communities are now aggrieved that someone actually managed to do exactly what they snarkily suggested: Mozilla built Rust which addresses many of the issues that C and C++ programmers have had with their respective languages, but which their communities refused to take seriously. And not only that, but now people are advocating for the rewriting of the C and C++ ecosystem in Rust, and many² in the C and C++ communities are having none of it. The sacrilege! Sacré bleu!

FWIW, I'm not a Rust fanboy--I think it's an improvement over C and C++, and I like a lot about it, but it's not likely to be my main language any time soon. And moreover the Rust community has its own foibles that chafe me (criticizing my preferred language without making a discernible effort to acknowledge how it manages to draw and retain its practitioners and enthusiasts 🙃³). I also think "rewrite it in Rust" is pretty facile--it's often a lazy substitute for a reasoned cost/benefit analysis. Even still, I appreciate that the whole "rewrite it in rust" phenomenon might make some C and C++ loyalists a little less likely to berate their fellow language enthusiasts when concerns are raised⁴.