iagev

It's pretty lousy for exploratory programming, where you load your current application to memory, then start adding a new function onto it, hot reloading on every change and testing your changes and external interfaces in the REPL. Rust's best approach to this seems to be evcxr, which is quite janky. So in practice you probably end up writing unit tests or dummy binaries that replicate similar behavior.

Examples of language implementations that are good at this: python (especially with ipython), most common lisp implementations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_exceptionalism lists out lots of the historical reasons. Essentially: successful propaganda over several centuries. Also helped: winning the last big war, winning the cold war, being the source of most of the entertainment/art in the western world.

In some ways, several places in the US probably are among the best in the world. And some are probably the worst. It's a large place in many ways.

Because of Rust, probably.

Are they really that weak that they cannot abide these things?

All of those are jokes of some kind, I think? Like PCMasterrace.

Are we now close to the times where one can again make a decent living smuggling Levi's jeans into Russia? Or just regular plain war?

You could potentially use some of them as money. Shocking, I know.