Stop making me memorize the borrow checker

I sincerely believe that it is nearly impossible to have an objective and constructive conversation about the merits of programming languages, because the language of choice becomes part of people's worldview.

So it's like discussing politics or religion. People think that they have objective views, but they can't overcome their beliefs. That's just how beliefs work. They almost never change.

Also, beliefs are tied to groups. Humans automatically adopt the beliefs of their group, at least to some degree. Or they learn to shut up about their disagreements.

This is a thread for Rust critics and Rust advocates. Try to seriously sell F# or some other ML-like language in here and you are going to end up annoying both the C++ people and the Rust people.

The world will be a better place when the AIs finally take over. If we survive.

In my opinion, it seems like you may be taking random internet discussions a bit too seriously; I don't actually expect too much meaningful programming language discourse to occur in Hacker News comments. I think the reason why I keep coming here is in part because it's one of the rare public forums where occasionally some truly interesting discussions really do happen, but don't forget Sturgeon's Law. For better or worse, public and open forums are rarely productive places to have discussions, and a lot of the real innovations certainly seem to happen behind closed doors. (Personally I greatly prefer public forums for discussion, and even would prefer anonymity if it were feasible, but I take what I can get.)

What does that say about participating here? Well, for me, sometimes when I write a comment that I feel is constructive, reasonable, and honest, it goes gray anyways, and it's easy to chalk it up to people just irrationally downvoting it because they don't like my opinion. It's also pretty easy to do this, I just need to be cynical about Apple or optimistic about the Go programming language, or something similar, and there's some percentage chance it will go negative depending on presumably who sees it first. It's not going to stop me from doing so, and ultimately it's pretty inconsequential, as I'm just some guy and my opinions are not really that important anyways.

Somehow, even though I have all of this internalized, I can't help but go 30 nested replies deep into threads debating about something senseless and unimportant, but it almost feels like it wouldn't be the Internet without debates like that. XKCD 386.