I define somebody as a zealot by their expression. Fanaticism, generalizations, editorial practices like misconstruing with the goal of tearing down a straw men, and even others.
If you show me Rust advocates with comments like these I would be happy to agree that there are in fact Rust zealots in this thread.
Generally, they don't. Zealotry is not specific to Rust, but you've reminded me of some moments in the 2020's edition of Programming Language Holy Wars™.
Like, one zealot stabbing at another HN commenter saying "Biased people like yourself don't belong in tech", because the other person simply did not like the Rust community. Or another zealot trying to start a cancel campaign on HN against a vocal anti-Rust person. Yet another vigorously denied the existence of Rust supremacism, while simultaneously raging on Twitter about Microsoft not choosing Rust for the Typescript compiler.
IMO, the sad part is watching zealots forget. Reality becomes a story in their head; much kinder, much softer to who they are. In their heads, they are an unbiased and objective person, whereas a "zealot" is just a bad word for a bad, faraway person. Evidence can't change that view because the zealot refuses to look & see; they want to talk. Hence, they fail the mirror test of self-awareness.
Well, most of them fail. The ones who don't forget & don't deny their zealotry, I have more respect for.
I fully stand behind my "Biased people like yourself don't belong in tech" statement from back then. If you follow the thread you'll see that this person mostly just wanted to hate. I tried to reason with them and they refused to participate.
I, or anybody else, owe them no grace beyond a certain point.
Where do you draw the line when confronted with people who already dislike you because they put you in a camp you don't even belong to but you still tried to reason with them to make them see nuance?
Skewing reality to match your bias makes for boring discussions. But again, I stand behind what I said then. And I refuse to be called a zealot. I don't even use Rust as actively; I use the right tool for the job and Rust was that on multiple projects.
If you're not interested in the context then please don't make hasty conclusions and misrepresent history. If you want to continue that old discussion here, I'm open to it.
EDIT: I would also love it if people just gave up the "zealot" label altogether. It's one of the ways to brand people and make them easier to hate or insult. I don't remember ever calling any opponent from the 'other side' a C/C++ zealot, for what it's worth. And again, if people want to actually discuss, I am all for it. But this is not what I have witnessed, historically.
