Language Evangelism Is Annoying
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I told him to stop, but he couldn't stop mentioning it. I got annoyed and snapped.
Evangelism is very annoying. Don't do this. If you don't like clojure, then get a new job that doesn't involve clojure, but don't come to clojure community and keep telling people to consider Rust or any other language.
If a clojure programmer disgruntled with a Rust job went to a rust community and kept telling people to maybe ditch Rust and consider clojure, would it not be annoying as hell?
I think your programming language is inferior to mine. You think my language is inferior to yours. No one is going to agree because it's a matter of opinion and taste.
Just let people use their languages according to their personal preferences. Let them write cobol, fortran, C, clojure, C++, Rust, Haskell, or whatever. Don't bother programmers with other languages.
Leave people alone. If you want to evangelize your language, publish contents. Don't bother people.
Evangelism is as annoying as an ugly guy stalking a beautiful princess. No means no. Respect personal boundaries.
The author recounts a frustrating encounter with a Rust evangelist in a Clojure community, sparking a discussion about the annoyance of language evangelism and the importance of respecting community boundaries.
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Oct 14, 2025 at 11:27 PM EDT
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It's okay to mention rust or any other language when it's a particularly good fit for a business or a project. But, shoving languages in people's faces repetitively is not okay.
In my experiences, directly telling people to do things differently never works. You have to wait for other people to ask you for advices, or you end up bothering other people.
Leave people alone. Don't nag people to use other languages.
You'll probably enjoy this ancient one though; it makes good points: https://www.perl.com/pub/2000/12/advocacy.html/
So, yes, he did.
Seems to me the evangelist is just being rude here, there are times and places where evangelism is fine, no?
Hi ChatGPT.