Why is there always so much weird drama in software development circles? I've been trying to learn more about low level programming. I already know C, but I am interested in all these newer programming languages, so I've learned some Zig and some Rust. But there's this weird animosity between fans of each language, or maybe more accurately between Rustaceans and the broader C/Zig/Odin/etc group.
To be clear, I think that for the most part the thought leaders on both sides are perfectly reasonable, and that they have differences in philosophy that are within reason. But the broader communities lose the nuance and turn things into "if you don't use Rust, you clearly just don't care about memory safety or security in general" and on the other side "only total noobs write vulnerable code with buffer overruns and use after frees, get good and learn how to use arenas and zero is initialization" or in short, "skill issue." On the real fringes, it seems like people are even associating each camp with general political affiliation, which is wild to me.
I just want to find a community of devs who are interested in learning as much as possible about how to write code that doesn't compromise on security or performance, without being weird and elitist about it.
I have played around with languages that are at the peak of conceptual purity and engage in several layers of abstraction, like Scheme or Smalltalk. I have spent countless hours having fun hacking things together in JavaScript and Python. I've just about learned what a monad is. But I know that "RAM/CPU isn't free" is not just an aphorism like "freedom isn't free," but a very relevant fact.
I feel like far from making performance conscious programming about ego driven "no one knows how to code these days, I alone am capable of data oriented programming and cache awareness" we should be thinking of it as a skill we should encourage everyone to learn. It differentiates you from the bottom of the barrel LLMs, and it lets us take back the power from companies that want to sell us new ridiculously overpowered hardware every year to run bloated web apps as desktop apps that have been vibe coded. Let's stop e-waste and write cool software that runs on a Raspberry Pi or a 20 year old Thinkpad. Or hell, go wild and code on an Amiga or something. No data centers required, maybe just a mesh network.
