Oh shit. I didn’t even realize season 3 had started.

I’m so stoked for Solo Leveling. Looking forward to the rest of the season.

Digimon Season 1 might be the closest thing to Christian.

When I was 13, the one Saturday morning that my fundie Christian mother decided to make an appearance before noon, Digimon season 1 was playing on the TV when she walked in. As soon as she’d seen three seconds of it, the whole channel was banned on Saturdays before noon (and I didn’t have cable, so there weren’t any other Saturday morning cartoon channels worth watching), all anime was of course summarily banned, and I got a talking to about Pokemon and Digimon being “satanic.”

It was about three years later on slow-ass DSL that I discovered Kazaa had anime. It took like two days to download a 23-minute episode, but by god I downloaded so fucking much anime that way. It was easier to sneak that than the TV in the family room.

We did it, everybody. High fives!

(Ok, I can’t take that much credit. I haven’t been here all that long. But I’ll still high-five you if you want.)

Reminds me of A Story About Magic.

Oh oh oh now do infinity, -infinity, -0, and NaN.

Gotcha. I can’t really speak to the quality of any Rust official documentation.

Of course it’s relevant to (my or anyone else’s use of) Ada as a language. And for any language the language and culture influence each other too much to consider them entirely separate. The attitude of the community invariably ends up being reflected in the syntax and standard library (and third party tools/libraries/documentation) of the language and vice versa. If you want in your head to decide there’s a distinction there, I guess that’s fine, but such a distinction has no practical benefit to a developer making the decision what language to use for such-and-such use-case.

And the ecosystem affects whether when I run into an obstacle, I can google for 5 minutes to find the solution or whether I’ll spend the next three days trying dozens of incorrect approaches suggested by StackOverflow answers and random comments on language-specific forums and Wordpress blog posts etc. Whether you consider “the ecosystem” part of the language or not, it’s worth considering when choosing a language to work in.

Yes, and answers on StackOverflow about languages that have toxic communities are worse than answers on StackOverflow about languages with less assholeish communities in my experience. As I mean it, StackOverflow posts tagged with the language (and probably even more so those posts’ responses) qualify as part of “the community”.

Yeah, but the shittiness of a shitty community will come through in documentation that talks down to you and doesn’t dain to explain things properly. And then when you go and ask a question because it wasn’t well explained in the documentation and get derided for asking.

Fanboys are also likely to mislead (including in documentation) by downplaying caveats in libraries and such. Documentation can end up being more like marketing speak than technical reference.

You speak of “vocal minorities”, but I don’t think it’s quite as simple as that. Languages have cultures around them. (As do lots of other things. Video games. Hardware devices. Car brands. What have you.) If a language has a toxic community around it, it might be an indication that the people behind the language may lack the ability or motivation to maintain a better community. Or worse, that they’re doing things that promote or attract the shittiness.

So, in short, I disagree with you. For one thing “everything about this language is great except its community is shitty” makes me suspicious that maybe everything about the language isn’t great and it has a really fanboyish community that likes to suppress any (even legitimate) negativity. Where I have to, I use the language I have to use, but when I have a choice, a shitty community is generally a deal breaker for me.

An attitude I’ve seen a lot among software developers is that basically there aren’t “good languages” and “bad languages.” That all languages are equal and all criticisms of particular languages and all opinions that some particular language is “bad” are invalid.

I couldn’t disagree more.

The syntax, tooling, standard library, third-party libraries, documentation quality, language maintainers’ policies, etc are of course factors that can be considered when evaluating how “good” a language is. But definitely one of the biggest factors that should be considered is how assholeish the community around a particular language is.

A decade or two ago, Ruby developers had a reputation for being smug and assholeish. I can’t say I knew a statistically significant number of Ruby developers, but the ones I did know definitely embodied that stereotype. I’ve heard recently that the Rust community has similar issues.

The Rust language has some interesting features that have made me want to look deeper, but what I’ve heard about the community around Rust has so far kept me away.

I write Java for a paycheck, but for my side projects, Go is my (no pun intended) go-to language. I’ve heard nothing but good things about its community. I think I’ll stick with it for a while.

If you’re abandoning Vue and React etc because jQuery is simpler, why on earth would you not abandon jQuery because browser builtins are simpler (and these days do basically everything jQuery does with virtually no added overhead)?

Code web app class homework assignment. Put a link to the AGPL on the main page. Let another student access the main page from their personal smartphone. Give them a copy of the source code. When professor accuses you of helping them cheat, you can tell the professor you legally had to.