People tend to contribute to the projects they already have the skills for.

People also tend to pick up new skills when they have a driving incentive to do so, like supporting a project they have a vested interest in seeing improved.

You need to learn the language's structures

Most of the bread and butter ones have analogues in other languages you should readily understand. More language-unique structures are rare; the more niche they are, the lower the odds your ability to contribute in a meaningful way hinges on your understanding of them.

you need to learn how the compiler works

You really don't, though? Modern compilers, particularly the Rust compiler, are designed to abstract away as much of the details of compilation as possible. If the project really does need to tickle the compiler a certain way to get it to build, it will almost certainly have a buildscript and/or a readme.

you need to learn the libraries that the FOSS project is using

This is true regardless of the language in use. I'm not sure why you brought it up.

you need to learn the security pitfalls for the language

I would imagine most of these language-specific security footguns are either A) so specific that you will never hit the conditions where they apply, B) are so blazingly obvious that code review will illuminate what you did wrong and you can learn how to fix it, or C) so obscure that even the project owner doesn't understand them, so you'd be at minimum matching the rest of the codebase quality.

Mind, I am not insinuating that one can simply bang out a whole new submodule of a project in an unfamiliar language with minimal learning time. Large contributions to large projects can be hard to make even when you're a veteran of the language in use, as the complexity of the project in and of itself can be its own massive barrier. But not every contribution needs to be big. And for most contributions, I don't believe the language is the most significant barrier to entry. It's a barrier, sure. But not the biggest one.

I'd wager it's not having a significant impact on the volume of contributions to Lemmy in particular.

No one said it was shameful?

It's a huge win, but not the kind of win people reading the statistic with no context (like me) probably thought.

I'm sure a lot of us looked at "15 percent of desktop PCs in India run Linux" and, regardless of whether it was hasty and irresponsible for us to do so, extrapolated that to, "15 percent of Indian PC users are personally selecting Linux and normalizing its paradigms".

But in reality, it sounds more like "15 percent of Indian PC users use Linux to launch Google Chrome". Which is impressive, but not the specific kind of impressive we wanted.

It feels a bit like how I imagine, say, a song artist feels when they pour their heart and soul into a piece of music, it gets modest to no traction for a while, and then years later a 20 second loop becomes the backing track for a massive Tiktok meme, and almost zero of that attention trickles back to their other work.

collaborate and listen?

Stateless functions still deal with state, they just don't hold onto it. Without state to mutate, a so-called stateless function doesn't do anything.

In declarative languages, your state is the sum of everything you've declared. You don't query results out of thin air. Computational results logically conclude from everything you set up.

HTML ""has state"", as in it has a DOM, but it doesn't do anything with it. You don't mutate the DOM after it's built, or query the DOM to compute results that weren't trivially evident from the state you declared.

You can do those things with JavaScript. But all that proves is JavaScript is a programming language, and HTML is just a data format it can interact with.

Sure. Which is why I would only make this distinction in a place where I can reasonably expect people to know better. Like, perhaps, a niche community on an experimental social media platform dedicated to programming.

This is a tremendous amount of cope. Implying there are Lemmy users just lining up to contribute PRs if only it wasn't written in Rust. Give me a break!

If someone was competent enough to author code that's fit to pull into a project like Lemmy, they're more than capable of translating those skills to Rust. No language seeing modern significant use is so esoteric that a reasonably seasoned developer couldn't make something competent in it within a week of starting to learn its syntax. Maybe a day, even, if the language you are trying to learn is highly similar to one you already know.

The bar for me is whether the language describes an executable program that has state and control flow.

You could perhaps be generous and describe the DOM as a (write-only) state and the parser as a control flow. I don't, personally.

HTML is just a data container format to me. Belongs with the likes of XML, JSON, JPG, PNG, GIF, MP3, MOV, etc.

The umbrella term I'd use for all of these is "coding". That's the skill of understanding structured languages and format specifications, and understanding how you can and can't piece things together to make something coherent. This is a critical requisite skill to programming. But programming is more.

Programming is the art of juggling of state and control flow in clever ways to trick funny rocks into computing something you don't know. It doesn't need to be general purpose, but I would argue it indeed needs to have a purpose. It has to be something more than just a pile of declarations you know from the outset. Otherwise it's just structured data.

Particularly in politics and news communities, it indicates a "here is what predicts will happen" article. They're not all shit by default, but I'm generally not interested in speculation pieces. I only want to know what actions concretely happened, not what some guy anticipates may happen.

oh cool. now I can block every trash news article that includes phrases like "blasts", "slams", "says", "should", "could", "might", and "need to".

Xenoblade Chronicles

I got one as a hand-me-down from my father's office when they replaced all their chairs. It's pretty well worn and the upholstery is rather frumpy these days, but the bones of the thing are still good.

I remember talking about desk chairs with a friend group and on a lark I thought I'd read off the model on it to demonstrate how unassuming this no-name chair I thought I had was. So I actually said something akin to, "Yeah, it's just some chair from some company called Herman Miller, whoever that is," and everyone was aghast. They had to explain to me what Herman Miller actually is, and I was very embarrassed for having accidentally humble bragged about it.