It's a west-coast tech industry consortium language that is a mashup of subsets of SML, C++ and Cyclone with some very strong opinions about aesthetic differences. "Simple" is not a good description. Lisps are simple. Rust, Java, C++ & friends are not. Also, the core paid promoters of rust are almost all alumni of the Ruby on Rails hype-train. You can judge for yourself if their promotion of rails was grounded in truth.
SML has signatures. In the absence of HKT, I think it's not a fair comparison. Most popular languages have interfaces even if not by that name. Haskell, Scala and C++ are special in that you can describe an interface for interfaces. I'm sure I'm not giving due credit to others.
Well, I certainly wasn't speaking about you specifically. However, did you not say that language promotion is what you do and that you quit Mozilla for not paying you enough for it here: https://steveklabnik.com/writing/thank-u-next ?
"promotion" doesn't appear in that post. My job was writing documentation. I did say that I was considering moving into evangelist/growth roles. My next job wasn't those two though, it was PM.
I guess you were trying to disparage Yehuda, then?
I mean that you are one of several. Hence the running joke is the "Rust Evangelism Strike Force" and not "that one rust guy."
An evangelist/growth focused role is exactly what a promoter is. If you spend large numbers of typical work-hours, which I'm assuming you're paid for, on social media to promote something, like Rust, or you go to conferences and events to speak publicly in promotion of something like Rust, then a "paid promoter" seems like a pretty accurate description.
Is that disparaging? Is that not what you are doing right now?
Given a 15 year retrospective, would you say that Rails lived up to the hype? If you think so, then there is nothing “disparaging” in that comment at all. If you don’t think so, then doesn’t that mean a reader should not regard such promotion with confidence? No need to be defensive.
It can be disparaging to say that someone is doing a thing because they got paid to, when they were not in fact paid to. Even when that thing, by itself, is not bad.
In this case it implies dishonest astroturfing or similar, especially when you talk about whether their statements were "grounded in truth". (Which is different from whether Ruby did well years later.)
