A data-driven case study: I posted the same 43,000-word article on a "from first principles" HTTP client to r/cprogramming, r/rust, and r/Python. The reception was... different

Posted by warren_jitsing@reddit | programming | View on Reddit | 107 comments

Hey r/programming,

I've just finished a massive educational project and wanted to share not just the project itself, but a fascinating case study on how it was received by different programming communities.

The Project (The Constant): First, the project. It's a "from first principles" guide to building a high-performance HTTP/1.1 client from scratch. The repository includes:

The Experiment (The Variable): I tailored a post for each of the C, Rust, and Python communities and shared my work on their respective subreddits.

The Data (The Results): The reception was wildly different across the communities.

(I've saved screenshots of these receptions in the project repo for full transparency, given the volatility. - https://github.com/InfiniteConsult/0004_std_lib_http_client/tree/main/reddit)

The Analysis (My Hypothesis): This data isn't about the quality of the project itself; it's a perfect case study in community values.

Conclusion: This was a fascinating lesson. The exact same high-effort project was celebrated as top-tier engineering by one community and dismissed as "AI slop" by another. The data strongly suggests that the r/cprogramming community engaged with the technical substance of the project, while the r/Python community reacted primarily to its framing, which they perceived as a cultural slight.

Disclaimer: This whole project is purely for educational purposes, may contain errors, and I'm not making any formal claims—just sharing my findings. It is primarily written to help people get into systems programming and is MIT Licensed.

As a side note, an unrelated high-performance Julia crash course I wrote and posted on r/Julia received a 97.6% upvote ratio, 39 upvotes, and 35 shares, which further supports the idea that communities focused on performance and technical education are highly receptive to this kind of in-depth content.

I'm curious what r/programming thinks this data says about our programming subcultures.