I don't intend this to be taken as a joke in any way, nor do I intend it to be unnecessarily mean, but I think that the Rust community inadvertently discovered a new paradigm of software development: Autism-Driven Development.

When we look at what they've created, both from a technological standpoint and from a community standpoint, I can't help but notice the impact that Asperger Syndrome may have had on how things have developed.

Let's start with the community. While the communities of languages like Perl, C++, Python, Java and C# developed organically over time, it is almost as if the Rust community has been manufactured instead. It's like the community's interactions have been scripted, to use a programming analogy. It seems to me that the Rust Code of Conduct may actually be there as a way to allow people who suffer from varying degrees of social ineptitude to interact in a way that mimics how they see other, naturally-formed programming language communities made of sociable individuals interacting. They wouldn't be able to manage this social interaction on their own. But if you give them a script or a checklist they can follow, they can at least engage in something that appears, on the surface, to be socializing. That's why I think their incorporation of social justice is quite interesting. In many ways the concepts of social justice are all about imposing a foreign order on what is naturally a very chaotic and perhaps unfair reality.

The language and its standard library also reflect behavior that may be expected from those suffering from Asperger Syndrome. While creating the language, it is as if its developers haven't been able to make the normal trade-offs that other language developers have made with ease. We've seen this result in Rust, as a language, constantly change over time. It's like they're striving for some unattainable form of perfection that most normal people would realize could not be attained. While other people would accept some drawbacks to their creation and move on, the Rust community appears to waver back and forth, unable to really make up its mind about how to proceed. Even the supposedly stable Rust 1.x release branch has seen 19 minor releases!

I think the complexity of the language also reflects the role that, I suspect, Asperger Syndrome has had on the development of Rust. It has become an immensely complex and convoluted language, even compared to a rather complex language like C++. It's like the language has been designed, perhaps unintentionally, to be cryptic and unwelcoming to normal people. By its very nature it is like it is trying to be self-isolating, to avoid having to interact with the world and the people around it. Programming languages like Java, Python, C++, Perl and PHP want to be used by normal people. Those languages evolved in ways that draw in new users. But Rust? It has evolved to become very difficult and awkward to use, especially for new, average users.

From what I can see, the entire Rust ecosystem exhibits the traits that have come to be associated with Asperger Syndrome, or autism in general. Rust has a certain natural awkwardness to it; a inherent difference from every other programming language and programming language community that exists. It's like it wants to fit in, yet no matter how hard it tries it just can't. It's like, in my opinion, the entire Rust ecosystem lacks a natural understanding or ease of existence that other programming language ecosystems develop naturally.

I am just speculating here, as I do not know any of the Rust developers on any personal level, but could it be that mild/moderate autism or some degree of Asperger Syndrome has influenced how the Rust programming language has developed? If the developers of a programming language exhibit autism or Asperger Syndrome, could they in turn pass this on, so to speak, to a programming language and a related community that they have created? Could Rust be an example of, for lack of a better term, Autism-Driven Development?