I think your parent is suggesting that this whimsical example is patronizing.

Some fun history here: Ruby uses #{} for string interpolation. I used to teach Ruby to folks as a job, and I believe that my boss, Jeff Casimir, said that they looked like lobster pincers in one of our classes. (If Jeff reads this and that's incorrect, my apologies!)

Years later, when I was writing this part of the book, I remembered this analogy, and we had the whole crab thing going on with Rust, and I thought it was a fun thing. So I put it in the book.

Some people find whimsy inherently patronizing or something. I dunno. It's an offhanded fun comment, not some sort of desire to "dumb things down" for anyone. We don't write anything with the intention of dumbing things down.

Hi Steve, thanks for the comments and for reading my somewhat grumpy post! I expect you've heard it all before. It's true, I do believe that Rust is basically a programming language for adult brains, and so it's a bit weird for the Rust book to contain sentences that sound like they're aimed at younger teenagers. I know there are teenagers learning Rust! And that's great. But when they're doing that, they're exercising quite an adult part of their personalities and I think they'd respond better to being treated as adults while they are bravely entering an adult world.

It's also true that I worry that the whimsical sentences that seem designed for children are somehow connected with what is often called the "Diversity and Inclusion" movement. In my company, the diversity and inclusion initiatives were characterized by childish activities, such as writing "motivational phrases" on post-its in colored pens and posting them on the walls of the office. The women I've spoken to about this really resented the fact that engaging with pro-women-in-tech initiatives meant having to behave childishly, and they resented even more strongly the implication that childishness was appealing to women and under-represented minorities.

"In my company, the diversity and inclusion initiatives were characterized by childish activities"

You may have some wires understandably crossed. Companies frequently end up hiring in people for all sorts of initiatives that end up doing some really childish stuff. Diversity and inclusion do not particularly stick out on this front. This is where we end up with the mockery around "trust falls" and that sort of thing, which are childish "team-building" activities, and have you ever seen a corporate presentation on how to do better sales? Yeowzers. It's not specifically a diversity/inclusion thing, it's all the corporations.

On the other side, there is a solid reason to use whimsical, or more accurately, highly visual and emotional analogies for that sort of thing: They're the things our brains remember. You'll encounter that sort of thing in a lot of foreign language courses, memorizing alphabets or symbols with mnemonics meant to engage emotional and visual memories around the item as a bootstrap towards remembering what it is.

That said, it is true these whimsical analogies travel poorly, because your cognitive association network will be different than everybody else's. I've got some mnemonics in my language I'm studying around my kid's pet bird and my wife's interactions with her parents; obviously they wouldn't be very meaningful to you if I tried to give them to you to use as your own association. You ought to make them up yourself for maximum effect. But, my main point here is that they aren't intrinsically silly, they are a legitimate way to remember otherwise difficult-to-remember things. After a decade of programming the meaning of curly braces may be obvious, but it isn't at first.

Thanks, I understand the point you're making about childishness not being specific to Diversity and Inclusion initiatives. Two things make me hesitate regarding whether that actually changes my critique:

1. As I say, other people I've spoken to (specifically, some women) share my dismay at the childishness of Diversity and Inclusion initiatives. So that suggests that they also had higher expectations. If you are right, then all of us had poorly calibrated expectations. That starts to seem less plausible; more plausible is that the Diversity and Inclusion sessions were unexpectedly childish even taking into account the background low expectation for any "sessions" / "initiatives".

2. I can think of no reason why Mozilla's documentation for a programming language would share the characteristics of a lame corporate "session" on something non-technical: I think that the people at Mozilla are intelligent and technical-minded, and to some extent work at Mozilla to get away from those depressing and embarrassing aspects of the corporate world. However, it is, as I understand it, an aim of Mozilla to make their technical documentation more approachable to sectors of society that have traditionally been poorly served by the tech community. Therefore one can think of reasons why Mozilla's documentation might share characteristics with the "Diversity and Inclusion movement".

I know I'm sniping at worthy causes, and being slightly insulting about people who have worked hard to document a fantastic programming language, and even I don't think it really comes across pleasantly. The reason I am doing it is because I, along with many others I think, am concerned about the way the political liberal/left (with which I identify) is damaging itself by uncritical adoption of modern dogma of mostly young "progressives"./ And there, in admitting that, I guess I've violated another site guideline.

It is really not clear to me why you are bringing Mozilla into this at all; they have absolutely nothing to do with any of this.

OK, I'm happy to hear you say that. It's definitely possible that I've made a totally spurious claim of a common cultural thread. I mean that sincerely: I didn't want what I was worrying about to be true and I'll remember that you say Mozilla's not like that. Thanks very much / respect for responding to this anonymous and rather odd/unfounded criticism.

It’s not that Mozilla is or is not like that even; I don’t know why you’re including Mozilla in with Rust. The contents of the Rust book have nothing to do with Mozilla in any way.

Ah, OK. I certainly had that wrong then. I had it in my head that the language was incubated at Mozilla and major efforts like documentation were funded by Mozilla / worked on by Mozilla employees.

That can all be true at the same time what I am saying is true.

A Mozilla employee can write something without the contents of the thing being dictated by Mozilla in some fashion.

Well, this is getting a bit philosophical but seeing as you don't mind discussing!

What you say may be true of Mozilla, but it's not true in general, is it? I mean, suppose two authors work at the same "institution". I think it's bound up in our notion of institution that the observer of this situation might expect, or at least not be surprised if, their creative output is subject to shared influences. So, OK, the theory I was floating was dubious because of its lack of real justification! But I don't think its reliance on a notion of institutional culture (shared influences) was problematic.