Things n' Stuff Thoughts about the universe in general

The 2023 Stack Overflow developer survey results are in, and here’s my (likely controversial) take:

Rust developers are the most self-centered, with Go developers close seconds.

Here are screenshots of the very nice “Worked with vs. want to work with” graphics for programming languages, with Rust and Go highlighted:

The colored lines show “worked with” vs. “wants to work with” with the color of the line indicating the direction: lines colored the same as the block that you are highlighting mean “developers working with this language, want to work with that other language”, while lines colored with other colors mean “developers working with that other language, want to work with this language”.

When you select most languages on this graphic, you’d see two lines connecting them to each other programming language – i.e. there are both developers working with this and want to work with the other, as well as developers working with the other that want to work with this.

Not so much for Rust and Go: it is easy to see that in the top screenshot, Rust developers want nothing to do with any other languages – all lines are pointing in (including the faint one from Go). For Go – bottom screenshot – the situation is pretty similar, but there is a faint Go colored line pointing towards Rust: some 5600 developers are working with Go and would like to give Rust a try.

Controversial Conclusion (read: flame bait)

Rust developers (as a general, according to the SO developer survey, not talking about specific developers here) are intellectually uncurious¹ – they have a niche and they are sticking to it! Not interested to learn anything else. Go developers (again, as a general non-specific observation) are, basically, the same – you might be able to interest them in a programming language even more limiting and less functional than Go, such as Rust, but nothing else.

1. And feeling quite a bit of smug superiority (this conclusion was tested on real Rust devs). [↩]

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 15th, 2023 at 13:09 and is filed under Evangelism, Programming, Software, Status. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.