> But why avoid Rust itself? Why look down on any rewrite-in-Rust initiatives?
It's not avoiding, but choosing not to work with it, and it boils down to a couple of reasons. First, I don't work with a language which doesn't have a native GCC frontend. This is part due to supporting GCC & Free Software, and part don't liking rugpulls like license changes and whatnot. My personal weight is beyond negligible in changing outcomes of big currents, but at least I have my principles and stick to them. It's worth noting that I'm not "burning inside" to keep this stance. It's natural for me to do this, and I already like and write C++ and I'm somewhat experienced in that preventing race conditions and memory safety, so that keeps me covered. For smaller stuff I like Go these days. It's a goofball of a language which is very performant and excellent for what it's designed for.
I like to have a tool belt covering a wide gamut of scenarios, and what I use most covers all the needs I have. So Rust is interesting, I don't need it for now.
For the rust rewrites, while I'm not against them in principle, rewriting GPL software with MIT and other permissive licenses is against my values, so I don't support any of them. Writing GPL software with Rust is very possible, and I might do that in the future, but currently I have a couple of heavyweight C++ projects I'd rather work on (in the caliber of material simulations running on HPC systems).
> I refuse to feel shame about wanting to learn and absorb other people's expertise.
My reasons for not interacting with communities are very different. I'm not ashamed of failing, doing mistakes or whatnot. The reasons of I'm tired of interacting with rude people who gets their dopamine from putting people down, so I don't want to navigate all the thorns of the people to get a small bit of knowledge from them. Second, I'm relatively good with reading language references and documentation. I can ingest API documentation with ease and work from first principles.
If required, I can fight the good fight in any arena. I just don't see value of doing it for anything and everything.
In short, I'm not that hopeless to play that game. I'll rather die on hills which are worthy of the fight.
> I start with an LLM session
I don't use LLMs because I don't condone how they are trained, and again reading the reference is much better than a chat interface for me.
Hope that helps.