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> I bash unfounded claims about it, such as those made in this discussion: […] that all other designs are "fringe"

You're mischaracterizing Mr Walton's argument here: it's not “non-Rust” design which are fringe, it's “non-memory safe”, and he's arguably correct on that front: no mainstream (even in the broadest sense) language that ever came after C++ was memory-unsafe. And C++ has been progressively abandoned from every domain where its performances characteristics weren't enough of an argument. It is the consensus in PL design, whether you like it or not, and Zig is going against that 30+ years old consensus. Rust is simply the first one to seriously challenge C and C++ on their remaining domains, but memory-safe languages are ubiquitous and have been for years.

> that it's achieved extreme success

For the domain Rust is aiming at, no other languages has ever reached this level since C++, that's it. Rust hasn't taken the crown, but it's doing things that have not been done before, and it's a hell of a success for a programming language designer!

> This one gave me pause, but I think you'll find that what mostly triggers my HN comments is not so much Rust but claims related to software correctness. […] (just as before we heard similar claims about Haskell, that triggered me just as much)

I think it's mainly a thinking framework issue. You can view software defects as belonging to one of two classes: (1) design errors, and (2) programming mistakes (typos, copy-paste…

While I appreciate the effort and the write-up, this methodology has a few flaws.

1) As you state, most high salary positions don't publish their salaries publicly, so a website with developer submitted salaries like levels.fyi provides better user metrics.

2) Most of the results on the "top ruby" link [1] are from dice.com... which then links to another job board [2], jobot.com. The post from jobot.com appears to be from a contingency recruiter with no company name stated. The lack of transparency there is a bit unsettling, but it might be accurate??

3) The only post in the top 20 that is actually from the hiring company is for a "contract" position, where the "salary" is the contractor hourly rate annualized, ie: doesn't cover health insurance, self-employment taxes, etc... so that "salary" would be much less apples-to-apples with a full-time position.

[1] https://www.devjobsscanner.com/top-paid-ruby-jobs/

[2] https://www.dice.com/jobs/detail/dc2e0bbd9bdcad4ac553c88fb064f690

Lots of real orgs use C#.

StackOverflow survey (self reported) for 2024 shows it at #5 leaving out HTML/CSS, and SQL[0]

DevJobsScanner shows it at #4 via scraping job postings[1]

It definitely has heavy adoption; well above Rust and Go despite what we see here on HN.

> Does it have any actual advantages over Java? The language evolves faster and is more akin to Kotlin than to Java, IMO. The DX is fantastic and there are a few gems like LINQ, Entity Framework, and Roslyn source generators. Modern C# can be very dense yet still highly legible.

C# switch expressions with pattern matching (not switch-case), for example[2], are fantastic.

[0] https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology

[1] https://www.devjobsscanner.com/blog/top-8-most-demanded-programming-languages/

[2] https://timdeschryver.dev/blog/pattern-matching-examples-in-csharp

A job market specific survey: https://www.devjobsscanner.com/blog/top-8-most-demanded-programming-languages/ They combine C and C++ together and it slides in at number 6. But together they only account for 5% of the job market. Totaling all such non-managed languages together is roughly 10% and that figure hasn't changed in decades. I'd bet that figure matches up with what consultancy firms that take on a wide variety of projects see. Needless to say, "massive numerical dominance" in relation to C is something that needs many qualifications to become true. Certainly there's a lot of C code out there, and C jobs, and in some niche domains it's very dominant. But there's just such a vast amount more of JavaScript, Java, and Python across more domains.

You are overestimating the voices / anecdotes / evangelists from the internet. I did this as well ... so no offense. When reading HN or Reddit one can easily get the impression that Java, C++ and C# are dead and the world has turned to Rust and Go. Esp. C# is underrated in the real world.

Here's some data of 12M scraped job offerings:

https://www.devjobsscanner.com/blog/top-8-most-demanded-programming-languages/

JavaScript: 31.42%

Python: 19.68%

Java: 18.51%

C#: 11.90%

C/C++: 8.29%

Go: 2.38%

Rust: 0.39%

I was a bit shocked about the Rust numbers. I'd expected it to be slightly above Go. Anyway. C# is strong. Java even more.

The only lists it's topped are for likeability by users, where it was followed by Elixir and Clojure. If we go by the meaning of popularity that suggests how many people use these languages, let alone professionally, their ratings are quite low (e.g. https://www.devjobsscanner.com/blog/top-8-most-demanded-programming-languages/). Considering how old Rust is, the numbers are significantly lower than of any language that's become truly popular (as in widespread). An old language used by so few people can be many things, but "popular" isn't one of them.