Why I Left Rust(jntrnr.com) |
Why I Left Rust(jntrnr.com) |
I'm actually really glad to see this sort of stuff be aired in the community, and I hope it strengthens the Rust community and makes the language stronger. I really hope that Rust gets greater adoption. The syntax with lifetimes is a bit painful, but everything else is really amazing for making super fast code when needed.
My guess is that it wouldn't have conquered every arena of computing outside of desktop computing like it has.
Fact of the matter: our entire industry is never taught how to professionally communicate, and these constant drama fests are the manifestation of immature communication skills, across the board, our entire industry.
These anti-woke people really are the biggest whiners in the room while pretending otherwise. If you're so triggered by black mermaids, how is anybody gonna take you fucking seriously. We act like Tech is insulating leftwingers from the world, but it really does the same for the whole political spectrum. If you stare at a computer all day and don't take care of yourself, you're gonna overreact to everything in the world.
(Until August 9.)
I have being part of rust community since 2013, I have seen lots of oddities over the years in this community. While it is inspiring to see such a dedicated and passionate community it is also upsetting to see same community kill off its own members based on disagreements and inability to carry any sort of constructive discourse.
Conference organizers sucked at communication, both internally and with the speaker.
But the speaker doesn't take the affront in stride, instead choosing to make a stink on Twitter, complain, swear about a ruined weekend, and call people racist. Not the kind of professionalism I would expect from a prospective keynote speaker.
JeanHeyd race-shamed their way right onto the main stage for a global tech conference? I can't imagine why anyone would take offense to that agenda. Yes, must be related to a blog post about compile-time reflection.
To me this was a great and necessary decision.
> "It was JeanHeyd who called Rust out for having no Black representation among Rust conference speakers."
Did I get that right?
More empathy is welcome (from the keynote person, too). Instead of giving up, let's try to improve things and avoid blaming instead. Blaming is not the best way to improve things, even if it hurt you.
Input: Presentations on some topics from some people.
Output: Fuzzy logic here right ?
I'm actually working on an app for organizations to make clear, fair, and transparent decisions systematically so things like this don't happen.
Programmers are control freaks.
If you don't let yourself to reach into things and flip bits in the machine's memory, that's going to boil over somewhere.
It would have been interesting, to write about who and what topic was chosen as a replacement as well. I guess, I can understand not wanting to have to do much with people, who for not justifying reasons demote a speaker, whom one thinks highly of. It probably raises the question of what is more important to oneself. The project or the other people involved in it. Apparently the project was not important enough.
This blog post has a feel of creating more drama though. The person considers themselves important enough, that people may wonder why they left Rust. Well, normal people leave and when people ask, they answer. Possibly in detail, possibly a canned answer. If people really want to know, they can ask. Making it a public announcement has the drama feel to it.
I get this feeling often with rather publicly well known projects. Supposedly prominent people who are so kind to donate their time to the cause, but at a hickup leave the project and write a drama blog post or worse tweet or something. Seemingly making us think, that they are a great loss for the project. Well apparently their priorities were different. More about the people or prestige of working on the project than the actual project, which they might even be harming with their drama blog post.
And then that section:
> I also felt the weight of the context of the decision. JeanHeyd isn't just a recent grant recipient of the Rust Foundation. JeanHeyd has important history with the Rust project.
> It was JeanHeyd who called Rust out for having no Black representation among Rust conference speakers. Rightly so, as both the Rust organization and the conferences had little to no Black representation.
> When I saw an organization that not only could act so coldly to an expert in the field, but also to one who was a vocal critic of Rust's lack of diversity, it was hard not to see the additional context.
> Systems have memory and biases. If the people that make up the system don't work to fight against these, they are perpetuated.
No, no, no. Firstly, no explanation, what JeanHeyd actually did for Rust. Nagging about lack of diversity OK, but did they make suggestions for people to invite? Or was it just complaining? I would not call it "important history" then. Complaining about diversity or the lack of is easy. Did they do anything themselves to change it? And why the racism? What inherent qualities does JeanHeyd ascribe to "black" people? And what significant contributions did JeanHeyd make?
I am for diversity, but it needs to be based on actual merit and not just that stupid "Oh we got no blacky, lets invite one, then we are good!". Make it a reasonable choice! Look for the talent and invite it, not because of some skin color ideas. Make sure you do not fall into bias avoiding other ethnicities because of who they are. But also make sure not to overlook greater merit, because you haven't ticked a bock on your skin color check list yet. If a "black" person is the best fit, choose them. If not, then choose someone else. Don't friggin base it on color. If you base these things merely on color of the skin, you are opening the doors for the unpleasant crowd, who will argue, that a person did not get into their position by merit, but by skin color. You don't want such crowd, so don't attract them with such argumentation.
> As my buddy Aman pointed out, the context that this would have also been the first keynote by a person of color at RustConf should not be lost here.
And the value in that is? Just to be aligned with ideology? Or some racism behind it?
As a viewer I want a good keynote. I don't care what the color of that person is. Why do you make it a color question? What does it have to do with color? This kind of argumentation makes me think, that they are actually more racist than others. It is all so forced, it is no longer authentic. Let it be done in authentic ways. And again, don't argue on the basis of skin color, otherwise you are just as racist as the guy who rejects a person on the basis of skin color.
In some situations one can argue on the basis of additional diverse cultural background being brought into a situation, group, company, etc. It needs to have something to do with the subject at hand though. Say for example a teacher in a primary school. There it could make a difference to have a person with different cultural background, to teach the children more things and make them aware of different culture. It is an argumentation one can follow. But just arguing: "We don't have 10 'black' people at our conference yet." is very weak and ethically slippery terrain.
Why can't we just focus on code and the brilliant work from JeanHeyd rather than politics? The Servo post was a reminder of how it used to be.
Is this an accusation that the change was made on racial grounds? Otherwise I fail to see why mentioning it.
I don't think discussion like this hurts anyone. I wish diversity was the default and we wouldn't need to discuss these issues, but we don't live in that world.
If we can just all get on the same page about this, we'll be able to figure out who it's appropriate for us to hate, as levelheaded software engineers who never let emotions cloud our judgments.
Time will tell what will happen, but when opposing viewpoints starts being hidden away, things tend to get relatively boring quickly.
If they know that the person's point of view is totally different than the most likely outcome, having this speaker as keynote speaker is not a good choice.
(With all that aside, they should have thought about it before inviting this person, and not after)
This whole post really is a first world problem and the issue at had is as great as the great explosion of the ant hill in the back garden, which almost no-one cares about.
And then we have all that serious business clash with the leadership behaving as if they are power-intoxicated menchildren. Gosh.
I almost wish some IBM or Microsoft bought their guts and made it all corporate proper, as much as I hate all things corporate.
Programmers want good stable languages that are a joy to work with. Everthing else but this can take a hike.
Now, since he was working on his own rust compile time reflection framework/proposal/vision, he decided to talk about that. Made it clear immediately to anyone he interacted with, and made clear that the whole idea was his own and doesn't reflect any opinion of the language team/etc.
Someone probably felt like making this a keynote talk would give the impression that his compile time reflection was actually going to be implemented. So after a week or so someone awkwardly decided the talk wasn't going to be a keynote, just a regular talk. After this, JeanHeid simply refused to attend RustConf at all: no one was accountable, no one really told JeanHeid they had a problem with his talk up until later, it wasn't clear if the decision came from RustConf organizers or Rust foundation, blah blah.
On the racism part, I can't say it's entirely irrelevant. You only see white rich dudes complaining about "all the woke stuff and the inclusivity". The fact that "no rustconf keynote speaker has ever been black" isn't really shocking to me, but simply because I don't see "being a keynote speaker" as something relevant. But when you could've been the "first black keynote speaker at rustconf" and then suddenly someone changes his mind about it, it's probably going to ring some bells if you've faced systematic discrimination for your whole life.
tl/dr: "The key message in this text is a call for accountability following the decision to downgrade JeanHeyd Meneide from keynote speaker at RustConf due to disagreements with his blog post. The decision was perceived as disrespectful and cruel, lacking in appropriate organizational procedures. This has highlighted a larger systemic problem within the Rust organization and prompted the author's resignation. They call for a full investigation, a greater focus on accountability rather than diplomacy, protection of individuals from such unjust actions, and the implementation of safeguards to prevent similar incidents in the future."
"But it was just a downgrade. I shake my head at people that say things like this. Clearly, they are not used to treating people - let alone experts in the field - with respect. "
It was actually just a downgrade - and using terms like 'cruel' lacks proportionality.
It's a bit petty, especially for these kinds of public grievances over very personal, pedantic kinds of things.
Obviously what Rust did was 'not good' - these things happen all the time - and they need perspective and context.
All this huff and puff from people who take themselves a bit too seriously, maybe to the point of arrogance - we're professionals not artists, and that means 'making sausage as best we can'. It's all sausage, nothing is perfect, toes get stepped on - roll with it - that is the sign of maturity and confidence. If there is a systemic issue take that up.
Paradoxically it's these kinds of public slap fights over that make me wary of being engaged with a community, it's too much Kardashian.
The person who forked that language didn't have any experience regarding languages/compilers before that fork. Later he tried to create BrainFuck like an interpreter and some unspecified lang parser/lexer.
Recently there were a few commits in this language after 3 weeks of silence. It's a vanity project of one twitch influencer.
I'm having trouble finding it. Can anyone link this post?
Preferably at least 50% women.
Event organizers need someone who can think through all the angles of decisions made and how it affects attendees and the communities being represented. The fact that a group made up of logical thinkers couldn't foresee this (or maybe they did and just don't care), is sad.
Is his role significant enough that his departure from Rust will force Rust leadership to fix their internal problems?
Is it role significant enough? Yes. Will it force a fix to the problems? He was the leadership. And they lost other big figures in the past to this kind of shenanigans without change. So probably not
No, which is mentioned in the blog post that caused the OP's resignation:
"As the Rust Foundation had trouble with its trademark rollout and the Rust Project presented itself as the capable group that can do the right thing, I find myself in the opposite situation here. The Rust Foundation has handled the grant work with utmost grace, respect, and professionalism for myself and Shepherd’s time. Contrarily, the Rust Project deigned to effectively pass several mandates down through an opaque process that affected me, while refusing to air to-this-minute unknown grievances with the direction of the Compile-Time Midterm Report."
The people with a crab or the electric zig on their social media profile thing are all the same and will end up being disappointed the same way at some point
Don't fanboy, stay critic and reevaluate your tools needs whenever possible
Are we to surmise that some people in the Rust leadership felt that the speaker was invited because of their race/skin color, and objected on this basis?
Or is it less dramatic than that -- simply that some people in leadership felt that the technical content just wasn't good enough, and the author of the article we're reading can't bear someone being judged on technical merit?
Either way, to put it in simple terms, I think we're reading an article from someone on the woke/progressive side complaining about the actions of the other side, right?
Perhaps it's actually this article (a complaining article with bizarre overly emotional language) which is evidence of problems with Rust's leadership community and the decision being complained about was reasonable?
* it’s a language and technical thing so human emotions and feelings don’t matter HTFU
* there’s a race and diversity aspect and anything that has to do with race and diversity offends me HTFU
Or some variant.
These are people doing stuff they’re passionate about. You may be an end user and don’t care about the internal politics, but for these folks it’s a group of humans working together with all the emotional complexities of such things. It’s more like a job for them than a technical project - with all the HR issues those entail. If you’ve ever worked on a standards effort it’s even more the human complexity roller coaster than a job. Add in they’re a bunch of socially maladjusted nerds, and the thresholds for drama are lower and the ability to navigate is even worse.
So, I think empathy for those who are hurt and their reasons isn’t uncalled for. Hearing the other side would be useful too.
On the race and diversity side: having a black person give a key note at a conference of this technical depth would be good. Arguing it shouldn’t matter doesn’t consider black engineers in a field where there are no peers like them that are visible. In your life where you’re surrounded by people like you everywhere you go it’s likely hard to understand directly, but as a nerd remember when you were in middle school and you just wished for one other person who loved assembler as much as you. That scratches the surface of the feeling of exclusion minority engineers feel - except it didn’t end in middle school, it happens every day in every interaction. Then when someone dares say “hey yeah I get you,” they get shouted down for “making it political,” which sounds an awful lot like “I don’t like black people standing up for themselves” to black peoples ears - further isolating them. I’m sorry you find that inconvenient and you feel like it shouldn’t matter. But as the person who doesn’t fit in and is made to remember that in situations and discussions like this, it’s bound to hurt. Hence, hence the emotions of hurt and betrayal on display.
And all the people who immediately started accusing rust of being "woke" are equally at fault here--don't think for a moment that I'm on your side. This whole thread is a disaster.
How did we get here in the first place that people seem to have religious beliefs over a language feature and want to scream at other people that they're heretics (and see the wailing and moaning in the Go community over generics for another example).
All of you, grow the goddamn fuck up, please.
Ngl, that looks like teen drama.
Really poor leadership, it seems there wasn’t even an attempt at mediation, or a vote, or anything.
The post claims that THERE WAS a vote, and that vote was to give the person a keynote talk... that was somehow rejected by the Rust Project... as the blog post asks at the end, how the heck can someone just say to the Rust Leadership, your vote is just void as I don't like the person or the talk?! How is that possible? Is the Leadership vote just accepted if the top dog likes the result, but not to be taken seriously otherwise?? How do people actually accept this kind of bullshit? If you are in the Rust Leadership, do you just accept being just a token like that? With your votes being completely ignored unless it aligns with the real power broker?
I don't know if that was a motivation here by the person who went solo or if they were just personally jilted over a technical disagreement about the best way to handle reflection, but from the outside it looks quite bad regardless, which shows again more consideration should have been paid to this decision.
Or sometimes, yes, you end up exposing your organization as the cabal of racist authoritarian illegitimate corporate-sellout puppetmasters that it actually is.
But I mean... I don't see strong evidence of the latter, unless there is more to the backstory than I gleaned from the process above, which is:
1. No non-white person has ever given a keynote at RustConf (according to the linked "Why I Left Rust" post)
2. This one was going to be that.
3. But then the conference organizers canceled it, in a ham-fisted way.
4. But also, the topic was controversial, in the sense that at least some stakeholders may have felt "this kind of compile time reflection will definitely not be added to Rust in the foreseeable future"
So... it is absolutely understandable that the Meneide was highly irritated by the way it was handled, and ended up declining to present at all.
But did the Rust organization "disgrace" this expert in the field? Did Rust act as a "cruel, heartless entity"?
I will concede the late rejection (of the talk as a "keynote") was "unprofessional", but... was it "vindictive"? That implies the organization wanted revenge for something... what?
It's not clear to me after clicking and reading for almost an hour. But it seems to be consistent with the pattern of the various entities around Rust stepping on their own dicks. I'm reminded of the Rust Foundation taking out full-page newspaper ads like "IMPLEMENTING A CRYPTO PONZI SCHEME? DO IT FASTER IN RUST!" and then actual Rust core team people were like ":fuck-you-emoji: :barf-emoji:".
I would be perhaps relieved that they are apparently making a significant effort at reforming their governance (https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/3392) were it not for the fact that one of the authors of that PR is the author of the post we're discussing here, who just quit the Rust project entirely. :grimace-of-regret-emjoi:
1. Dude gets invited to do a keynote.
2. Dude gets his keynote invite withdrawn because some members of the rust team were "uncomfortable" with the content of dude's blog. The content which was technical and not of the standard Twitter/cancellation variety.
3. Second Dude leaves rust leadership because he seen how the rust community treated first dude.
Alternatively, look at the Go community and leadership. The Go team discussed generics and eventually implemented them although leadership and the community was often against it. They certainly didn't cancel keynotes or speakers that were pro-generics.
Any project with such people in it would succeed despite of them, not because of them. It's sad to see a project burdened by egos and bureaucracy.
But other than that, rust is just a "modern ADA", nothing more. It cannot easily get interfaced with existing UI API either. Having verifiable code is a niche thing, it is very important, but most programmers don't need it.
Not to mention that rust is generally more difficult to read than C, and a language will always fail to be largely adopted if its learning curve is too steep. At least in C++, you can write code that resembles C, so it's still approachable to beginners. Not in rust.
I wish rust was easier to learn and had a syntax closer to C, while retaining its secure features. It has too many weird specific features and syntax that are too alien. A big reason python is popular is because it retains this "C style" and is so easy to deal with. Rust is the opposite of that.
(I don't agree with flagging either)
Especial the combos of * and []. And it's full of tiny gotchas what is width of type char? What is UB? Why is it segfaulting and so on?
Sure to C trained eye it looks normal, but to a Rust trained eye Rust looks normal.
C++ does better in some ways, and much worse in others (i.e. the incredibly verbose language, the Turing complete templates, the documented standards that take years to be implemented by any real compiler). Both languages are excellent for their problem space, but terrible for beginners.
Rust isn't verifiable code, the language is far from formally verified. Just one level down into the standard library you'll find tons of unsafe{} blocks and other performance related trickery that invalidates the idea of pure verification. It does verify more things, like ownership, that other languages like C++ ask you to do yourself (i.e. remember to use move() because the compiler won't tell you if you don't) but that's just a drop in the bucket of program verification. It also produces better programs, in my opinion; the logs of programs written in other native languages quickly end up full of failed assert()a and memory corruption related crashes still happen to me on a weekly basis. Rust programs have their flaws (for example, being completely unable to deal with memory exhaustion from a language perspective) but I see a lot fewer Rust crashes and bugged our programs than any other language in that space.
I also reject the notion that Rust is hard to read than C. It's more verbose, for sure, but that same complexity is still present in all of those "simple" C programs. You can just use mut for every variable and reassign it, you don't need to do all those functional operations or shadowing that you see in many Rust code bases. You can't ignore Result or Option types like you can in C, but in C fork() can still fail regardless of whether you're forced to deal with it or not, integers are still cast regardless of explicit casting, and all of the hidden assumptions about structs, pointers, and lifetimes are still present, regardless of whether you write them down or not. C lacks the ability to express complexity you're supposed to know, but that makes it more difficult to read correctly, not easier. The biggest issue with Rust readability is the alternate syntax inside macros, but there are plenty of preprocessor statements that do very much the same thing. Microsoft had developed some very extensive frameworks that are completely strung together by preprocessor macros exactly because the language was too limited to do what they wanted (but they couldn't afford to invent a better language, yet).
I don't think Python is C like at all. It's a scripting language without static typing so it can't really get too complex in the first place. Syntax wise, I'd group is closer to PowerShell than to C. Where it can, it does insert complexity (lambda functions, list/dict comprehensions, object oriented design) but it's relatively simple because you don't deal with memory allocation, pointers, or concurrency yourself.
You may be interested in Zig. It seems to be to C what Rust is to C++. The language isn't completely finished yet, but it's getting there. It features many modern language features in a language that is very C-like, with a potential solution for the allocation problem built into the language standard.
Someone is an expert in this field.
They're asked to speak at RustConf after a leadership vote.
They've also written an article about reflection in Rust - a purely technical thing that is already pretty widely disliked conceptually. (EDIT: the talk was about this, but it's also compile time reflection and came with the usual disclaimer that it was not representative of any of the Rust team's viewpoints or support)
Rust members were "uncomfortable" with this purely technical viewpoint - not their behavior, personal beliefs, or even their demographic?
And then they pushed them out of the conference behind leadership's back?
Did I miss something? This is indeed really childish behavior.
EDIT: oh. It's not even reflection, it's compile time reflection. As in, it's not the next Java but instead something that might actually be very useful for the language if done correctly.
https://thephd.dev/i-am-no-longer-speaking-at-rustconf-2023
> The sudden reversal smacks of shadowy decisions that are non-transparent to normal contributors like myself. It is a brutal introduction to the way the Rust Project actually does business that is not covered by its publicly-available Procedures and Practices and absolutely not at all mentioned in its Code of Conduct.
Agreed. The Rust project needs to stamp this out before it begins to fester. This is incredibly stupid behavior coming from what is being regarded as the next C++.
Come on, Rust committee. Let's grow up here, shall we?
Rust the language is pretty good but the community around it has become really off-putting. The thick veneer of empathy and compassion quickly devolves into "idiot compassion" and emotional blackmail. Even the linked post contains the following:
"I left because when I felt JeanHeyd's pain and disappointment at being mistreated and betrayed, my heart broke. I wept because of the cruelty. But I also wept because I helped create the system that could do this to someone."
There was also the recent easily preventable drama [1] around the trademark guidelines some people left rust over. I don't really find any of this drama coming out of this culture very surprising. I write rust every day, I don't have to identify or interact with any sort of community around it, but I care about the future of it. I just hope it's already too big to fail at this point, because there is way more drama coming out of this community in the future, that's for certain.
If he did the talk. If he did it as a keynote. If someone else is “leaving rust” because of it?
It all seems so fabulously irrelevant, I really struggle to understand why:
1) I should care (I don’t, currently)
2) People are coming out of the woodwork to criticise the rust team / foundation whatever when they’re not involved.
3) Why people having emotions (eg. The person above, who does care) is somehow a bad thing?
4) Any kind of positive out come is going to come of this.
I really struggle to view doing anything else as not hostile to the rust project or having an agenda (“stop rust being woke!!”) which is non technical, and unhelpful.
Rust is great. It’s not perfect. The people who build it are not perfect, the foundation is not perfect.
People are not perfect.
It’s ok.
Call out problematic behaviour, don’t obsess over it.
I’m a bit hesitant to say this out loud, but… you can only cry over this “betrayal”, “mistreatment” and “cruelty” if you have lived a very protected life.
I wouldn’t want to work with someone that wrote this. I’m not sure which is worse—if it’s hyperbole or it isn’t.
Yes, treat people with respect, but we also need people to have even a marginal resilience to adversity. The bar for being emotionally damaged seems to be getting lower and lower for people.
If you can’t take criticism, don’t work in open source. You will never have 100% support from all people at all times. Many developers will manage social interactions (and organizing conferences) badly. That’s life
The original behavior is childish. And the quoted paragraph I have there about it revealing some internal mechanics of the leadership group is an important observation, one I'm much more concerned with.
It's revealing that Rust's open operation may not be so open after all. That can quickly cause a lot of problems if not quelled.
I think it depends what you're uncomfortable with. I remember some drama about removing some speakers from security conferences a while back, because people were understandably uncomfortable with them being rapists.
But being uncomfortable with ... talk about how compile time reflection might work in future versions of Rust? Huh? What?
Also I do agree about the language. People are from different cultures and so on, yada yada, but to me the used language feels very overdramatized and childish.
If anything, people should be pushed to accepting feeling uncomfortable. It means they're meeting challenging ideas, opposing viewpoints, and getting out of their comfort zone and echo bubble.
Except if "not feeling comfortamble" is because someone e.g. exposes their junk, or farts endlessly on purpose during a conference. That, sure, should be curbed.
Ironic https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2021-March/235124.html
A Go stack is looking quite achievable.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Mountain-Three-Wolf-Short-Sleeve/dp/B...
Claim of "feeling uncomfortable" was invented to be a tool of political fighting which allows to declare something, or somebody as unacceptable, completely avoiding debates. As it's becoming generally normalized, it's absolutely logical that it spills into other fields of human interaction. It's simple, and efficient, so why not?
Is this sarcasm? I think it's pretty obvious why not. Broken communication, poor decisions, and the obvious fallout.
This isn't a case of one person who was powerless to stop what happened and felt that making a big stink on the internet was the only solution—this was one of the primary decision makers shaping the future of Rust. I think there's a lot of context missing from this blog post about why they felt the need to resign rather than use their position to improve decision making.
For now I'm withholding judgement on who will turn out to be in the right.
[0] Still listed here: https://www.rust-lang.org/governance/teams/core
[1] https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2022/10/06/governance...
First the thing with the code of conduct and all that, that I think distracts from the technical questions. It is important to be inclusive, as not to exclude people who could make valuable contributions, but if it becomes a topic of argument, then it becomes counter-productive.
The second is the "rewrite it in Rust" crowd. I mean, no language is strictly better than another, it is all about tradeoffs. And rewriting a piece of software is not a decision to be taken lightly, see the "second system" anti-pattern. Rust has a place, maybe an important place, but I dislike fanaticism in general.
The first point seems to have died off a little, and most discussions I see about Rust now seem to be technical, which is a good point. And I expect the second point to become a bit less prevalent as the language becomes mainstream and stories about people being miserable with Rust will inevitable surface. I don't think a language can be considered mature unless (some) people start hating using it.
I have wondered now and then about how the Rust community culture might have damaged the language. In particular, I've said for many years that Rust botched error handling by eschewing exceptions yet including panics anyway, leading to a doubling of the error handling infrastructure (you pay for both error objects and stack unwinding support) and the inability of the standard library to survive allocation failure.
It's an unfixable mistake, although the language designers have walked it back the best they can over the years, culminating in the current yeet proposal.
Did Rust end up with both errors and panics because the community suppressed robust debate in the name of kindness and "safety"? Was the current approach a way to try to make everyone happy without conflict?
https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/23/rust_moderation_team_...
There seems be something rotten at Rust and I've no idea what but anyone who gets a close look at Rust leadership seems to sprint away.
It doesn't seem to be a matter of stamping something out it'll be an entire overhaul.
Essentially no-one wants to do diplomatic stuff, so it falls to only person that likes doing that stuff (which isn't a good thing). Which can leads to episodes like this.
People seemed to have forgotten some of the early events from years ago when Rust was less popular.
>>The Rust project needs to stamp this out before it begins to fester
It has been there since the formation of the Lang, it is built into the DNA of the community. people that want technical merits to shine are the ones trying to change the community, not the other way round
In the world of technology, fundamental tech like programming languages can persist seemingly forever but the truth is that there's great big winners and a whole lot of losers. We also don't like to compare seemingly-unrelated languages to each other because of their fundamental differences in how they're meant to be used but the truth is that a lot more people know and learn Python than will ever learn C or C++ (or Rust).
It's because C and C++ never really evolved into better languages. They never got rid of the bad ideas (e.g. goto) and just kept piling on new stuff, leaving new learners of the language just that much more to have to learn.
Languages like Rust and Python actually remove old, bad syntaxes/ideas and implement checks and helpful compiler messages regarding bad patterns. IMHO, this makes them vastly more likely to be around 25, 50, or even 100 years from now than languages (or OSes) that never remove technological debt.
I agree with everything that the speaker and JT have said in their respective posts. This is unacceptable, it needs to be fixed and the person who was “uncomfortable” needs to be held accountable.
But I think it’s worth waiting for a couple of working days before picking up our pitchforks. Let’s give folks the benefit of the doubt. Let’s not ask the Rust committee to “grow up” when they haven’t done anything yet and haven’t even had a chance to respond.
> They've also written an article about reflection in Rust[...]
> Rust members were "uncomfortable" with this purely technical viewpoint [...].
As I understand their own words (your link), they wrote the article, were invited to talk, and decided to talk about the content of the article and related things (because that’s what they had been working on recently and you generally give talks about things you work on).
Not making a value judgment, just want to point out the connection is less indirect than your comment implies.
> Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low.
Conference speakers is the definition of low stakes rife for pointless politicking.
I honestly don't understand why the Rust compiler reflection tech talk was the slightest bit controversial. Even if no one is in favor of the proposal, it can still be an interesting thought experiment. Such issues may expose design issues.
I agree with other commenters: anyone who is prone to playing politics with these low stakes issues needs to be pruned before they do real damage.
https://soasis.org/posts/a-mirror-for-rust-a-plan-for-generi... - Is this the post ?
I don't know if their approach is the right one. I think the visitor pattern is a bit limited in usefulness (where it fits nicely for serde, it'll fall flat for other more exotic use cases I think. But I've not thought about it for more than about 5 minutes and haven't considered any other possible alternatives - they have.)
However, I agree with them in that the current song and dance with syn being the prevailing defacto crate most of our macros are built on is a bit absurd, especially since they refuse to open up proc_macro internals for use by the public. I can certainly see both sides' points but the net effect is that, right now, the macro business yields subpar error handling and feels very much hacked on rather than being a natural part of the language like most other things in Rust seem to.
Declining a keynote because you disagree with it just works to highlight a lack of welcoming of diverse viewpoints in the community. Having a perspective highlighted you disagree with would actually show how open and welcoming the community is.
This assumes of course the person was not making promises on behalf of the project to the community (who knows maybe they were?) but rather expressing their own opinions.
Having a keynote is not some endorsement that this is the future direction of the project.
As if their personal beliefs or demographic would be more acceptable things to have concerns over, in a technical conference setting?
This shit has just become too normalized and acceptable in contexts where it shouldn't be. You're not marrying them or making them friends.
>And then they pushed them out of the conference behind leadership's back?
>Did I miss something? This is indeed really childish behavior.
You're jumping to a lot of conclusions here. The article was written by someone who is clearly upset about the incident and doesn't go into a lot of detail about the motivation of the other party ("as best as I understand it, because of the content of JeanHeyd's blog post on reflection"). Would the "uncomfortable" team members agree that it was a matter of "comfort" that was caused primarily by the topic of a blog post? Are any relevant facts, by any chance, left out of the article? We don't know.
What we do know is that it didn't happen behind the leadership's back: "This discomfort was brought to the interim leadership group [...] A person in Rust leadership then [...] reached directly to RustConf leadership [...] RustConf leadership decided to wait a week [...] giving Rust leadership time to change its mind."
This is a very egotistical industry and this is one of many ways that manifests.
> More specifically, I was nominated by “Rust Project Leadership” (to be exact with the wording) to give a keynote
That wording is misleading. If what this “Rust Project Leadership” committee says doesn't stick but can be overridden by someone (or someones) else, then they're not actually leading anything; the overrider is.
Have these people realised yet that they're just a façade?
>> Come on, Rust committee. Let's grow up here, shall we?
It is too much power held by one group with too little accountability.
More transparency is needed and more people from different organizations need to be involved.
The fact that JT and the rest of us have to guess what really happened speaks volumes.
My understanding is that they (unilaterally) changed the talk's status from "keynote" to "regular talk", so they didn't quite push them out.
Effectively, but worth noting for clarity that they only explicitly wanted to demote the talk from keynote. But as this was disrespectful, the speaker withdrew entirely.
If I was askwd to give a keynote somewhere and upon presentation of my topic the organization decides another talk is better suited I would trust them that they wouldn't do that lightly.
Rust may, or may not, be the next best thing. However, the zealotry expressed by some rust pundits, is very off putting to me. One thing I have learned, is that zealotry is where moral compromise enters, it is where "for their own good" and "the ends justify the means" starts, followed by concepts such as "we need to force people to understand".
Some rust pundits seem to be such zealots, injecting rust commentary into everything. Almost religious.
Thus, I am not surprised by this. To speak ill of the holy relic, to utter dissent, drives zealots to mad excess!
Have in mind that 99.99% of Rust devs out there chose it on technical merits and couldn't care less about their internal infighting even if we were paid to care.
Maybe that really is the problem. Too much reflection leads to clever, but hard to debug hacks. Look what happened with C++ templates and, further back, LISP macros. That way lies code that's unusually hard to read and maintain. Rust probably shouldn't go that way.
Do you want to have a keynote address on an idea of that type? It's more of a subject for a proposal talk.
I read through the original blog post from JeanHeyd[1] and in no way do they mention anything related to being a person of color, why then does JT associate it with that? I have no idea about the inner workings of the rust leadership team and who they are even, but from the timeline described and from the original post, there's nothing the could be related to that. JeanHeyd is a technical expert and not a token, I feel like introducing the issue of being "a person of color" (as if white is not a color, but whatever) is strange IMO and also needs to be called out. I respect and enjoy JT's work and learned a lot from them, but this is also something that should not be just mentioned casually. If JeanHeyd was invited or their talk demoted because of the color of their skin then there's totally different conversation to be had (and a totally different kind of accountability).
This behavior is disrespectful _regardless_ of the skin color of the expert! It doesn't change it one bit.
Just because they're not white shouldn't afford them any special treatment, and I say that as a non-white person. Merit is what counts, treating experts with affordance to their biology is patronizing at the very least.
My two cents.
1: https://thephd.dev/i-am-no-longer-speaking-at-rustconf-2023
Framing a technical presentation you disagree with as "making you uncomfortable" in highly manipulative fashion definitely deserves to be called out in public.
You give a talk. People show up. They clap at the end. Does it really matter what some title on some conference website is? The communication was perhaps a bit more confusing and hectic than it should have been, but does that really matter? Is that really a big deal?
I don't even understand why anyone would overly care about this in the first place, and now it's also an example of systemic bias against black people, "cruel", and "heartless"?
If the talk had been outright cancelled: sure, what would have been a right dick move. But from what I can see all that happened is that the "status" (that I don't think many pay attention to) got "downgraded" and (maybe) moved to a different timeslot. I'm just confused why this would spark such strong reactions.
Can we just stop with this intolerance of differing opinions? It's OK to disagree with someone. We don't need to all share the same opinions. Why the fuck would you have a conference if not to inject some healthy discourse in your community?
It made me veeeeeeeeery uncomfortable. Still a very good talk.
I come from .NET background and am open to the idea of a realistic C/C++ replacement. My experience with .NET and its "community" has left me with a really comfortable feeling with regard to my ability to do business, just "get shit done", etc. To be clear, there isn't really a community. I think that's why you don't hear a whole lot of drama come out of it. It's more of a LARP where we pretend we have some kind of say and sometimes Microsoft's leadership agrees and it looks like we participated openly. Most on HN hate this, but when you are trying to build a stable B2B product and signing 5+ year contracts, it's a goddamn paradise to not have concerns about what angry corners of social media might be up in arms about today.
https://exceptionnotfound.net/the-catch-block-80-the-dotnet-...
Literally, it means https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_action_role-playing_game
Basically taking the transformation that made sports into sports computer games and running it in reverse on computer RPGs so you get people in costume in the park throwing colored balls at each other to "cast spells".
Not really my thing, but a great way to get more fresh air and exercise if you're into RPGs.
There is a core of extremely zealous "Rust wins all the things" types who don't stop at advocating for a language on its technical merits: they have to belittle and berate users of other languages because their choice (or not: employment is what it is) isn't "correct." The Rust community has (a well deserved, in my opinion) reputation.
I keep hearing people claim this to be the case, but I've never seen this behavior as described in the wild - I only see the complaints about it.
Yes, Rustaceans will evangelize and whatnot but I don't see the belittling or berating.
A what now?
Am I the only one that considers such arbitrary "diversity enforcement policy" horribly racist?
No organisation should be "called out for a lack of - insert-race-here- representation unless that organisation is in fact discriminatory. No one should be discouraged, relegated, skipped for mentoring or removed from a membership or a leadership role in an organisation because that person is the wrong race. Regardless of the reason why you feel that race is wrong. Calling out a group "for lack of Black representation" is basically telling every single non-Black member of that group they are less valuable because of the color of their skin.
People are not exchangeable units whose defining feature is the color of their skin. How can intelligent people not see this kind of thinking leads to the worst of social divisions?
Personally, I was with the author until that quote. If I was a member of that organisation I too would not be OK being represented by a person that makes such horribly offensive personal opinions known regardless of their technical expertise.
As things stand, this whole things smells very weird, so weird I almost cannot believe what happened, so would be most interesting to hear what the other side has to say.
"Hey we think you have great ideas to share, and would really like you to share them."
On short notice: "One of our team members thinks your ideas aren't that important after all, we are going to remove you from the headline. Please keep it short kthxbye."
It shows bad planning, bad organization, lack of cohesion, and outright disrespect of your professional time. You may choose to accept that slap to your face (signaling that it's okay to do that to you), but there's nothing unprofessional about rejecting the attendance and rightfully criticizing the organizers for their rudeness.
I agree that it’s bad planning. And in particular, the reasons of “discomfort” are really terrible. However, it’s a very small hill to die on. Like, a mound.
Others acting professionally is the best outcome for those who do not do so.
This bit stood out to me as the main thing that's probably at least rationally explainable:
> Why did RustConf leadership go along with this decision and not protect the speaker? Why wasn't Rust leadership notified of the time period in which to change the decision?
which feeds from:
> A person in Rust leadership then, without taking a vote from the interim leadership group (remember, JeanHeyd was voted on and selected by Rust leadership), reached directly to RustConf leadership and asked to change the invitation.
I can easily picture the RustConf leadership believing that the person from Rust leadership was either operating with full knowledge of the leadership, or would be communicating with them.
I've grown to really like Rust over the years, but this was very much despite the Rust fanatics, not because of them.
Now that ChatGPT has come along, I find it much preferable for coding assistance than dealing with the Rust fandom. "Why are you bothering with all this FFI stuff? You should just rewrite all your dependencies in Rust!" shudder
Disagreement in technical development is highly valuable... alternative points of view should be prized and inspected, not ostracized. Quashing alternate views and opinions is a sign of a small intellect and/or a narcissistic personality disorder.
For the good of the Rust community, there needs to be some transparency on who exactly did what and those people who deviated from Rust leadership rules need to apologize. It will probably be very uncomfortable for those individuals, but too bad... get over yourselves... you screwed up... you should try to make it right.
There is probably no salvaging this current situation, but a description of what happened, mistakes made, and an authentic apology would go a long way. If folks can't own their mistakes, they need to evaluate their character and consider stepping aside... although, if folks don't understand what they did was wrong, they are probably incapable of real introspection (see comment above about narcissistic personality disorder).
To those Rust leaders who felt uncomfortable with Keynote speaker's probable topics of address... and decided it was okay to let your discomfort lead to this disgraceful outcome... shame on you. You need to take a good look in the mirror and learn some scientific history (remember, it's computer SCIENCE): scientist who use politics to quash alternate theories and views almost always acted from narcissism and almost always harmed scientific progress. Your actions are probably harming Rust.
Participative leadership, otoh, is a pain. Every topic is a tug-of-war. Every decision has a significant party that disagrees and is unhappy with the outcome. Every ego flourishes. Even the serene will feel poised and entitled to raise endless issues. There's a general lack of perspective and very few people celebrating what has been accomplished. All milestones are muddied by buts and ifs and people feel like shit.
Yet in every disagreement lies opportunity. Multiplying successes is the heart and soul of teamwork. That's why participative groups are better because worse is better. I hope the Rust team doesn't lose perspective and keep, as before, working hard to drive such a great language, toolchain and open community forward.
Another thing that rubs me the wrong way: "lack of Black representation". So here's the question: is somebody actively suppressing Black applicants, or are there simply no Black applicants?
If it's the former, obviously that's a huge problem. But I suspect it's the latter and if that's really the case then this seems like people basically rebelling against an objective reality they can do nothing against, but still make a drama over it. If there are literally no black people who want to do things X and Y, how is that even a reason to feel bad about stuff? Same way as you won't find many Japanese golfers in, say, Italy. There simply are not enough people out there with the characteristics you are focused on that do the things you feel they should feel more represented in. Nothing you can do.
EDIT: And before I keep receiving replies that are COMPLETELY OFF-TOPIC, my question to any reader or commenter is this: where do we draw the line on what should the Rust Foundation do when relating to world-wide social injustice problems? Many people seem to think that it's a trampoline to achieving social justice in the world and I strongly disagree with that stance. Let's keep our goals realistic and compartmentalized; there are other organizations out there that fight injustice as their main objective. Rust Foundation is not that.
And I am not sure what does the Rust Foundation has to do with self-reinforcing problems stemming from racism.
Moving the goalposts all the way to the skies is why we can't have productive discussions in many venues of life, sadly.
There isn't a conference where I don't hear about a LGBTQ person not being offended by so and so.
Then you have the politics of who gets to set out the true vision or be a chair at this or that committee.
If you're serious about programming, you just stay away from both of these. Being a language expert is pretty irrelevant anyway, it's just some ego-boosting in case you can't be successful at your business domain.
I tried to use it myself as an opportunity to advertise my company, myself or the problem domain I work in, and found that it's most efficient to go to recorded ones only and only attend for the smallest duration you need to.
Really? Which golang conference canceled an already invited keynote speaker because someone was feeling "uncomfortable"?
How many Python, C, C++, C# related conferences did so?
Genuinely curious, just to establish a baseline.
What will happen next ?
I do not want to pass judgment on either side or the claims made, but simply note this feels awfully similar to the way I’ve seen people treated at big corporate jobs when rival senior leaders go to war.
Is it that BDFL-based governance just works better, or do people have higher expectations from Rust community than from, say, Linux one?
Bless your heart. The modern world is tame and blissful in comparison to the world of the 90's. Then, most projects could be individually maintained and so treated their drama with public forks of source code and shrieking on mailing lists. We who lived through that remember the ejection of Theo from NetBSD and the resulting fork of OpenBSD, the XFree86/Xorg fork, the gcc/egcs fork, emacs/xemacs, the list goes on and on.
Today, most major maintainers are employed by name brand corporations to do their work, which highly constrains the amount of drama to "stuff that doesn't embarrass your boss". So board-level end-arounds like the linked article is all we get. It used to be much more personal.
I believe these must've been Oppenheimer's words
That's what I think most people find terrible about Rust leadership's handling of the situation. It's not that this specific keynote was super important, it's that the team let the speaker spend a few weeks preparing a keynote and then pulled the rug on him.
[0] https://thephd.dev/i-am-no-longer-speaking-at-rustconf-2023
If I understand the story correctly, they downgraded the talk from a keynote to a regular talk. Which — if, like you say, was about purely technical thing that was pretty widely disliked conceptually — maybe shouldn't have been a keynote in the first place?
FTA:
> It was JeanHeyd who called Rust out for having no Black representation
The implication here is that this person was uninvited for pushing a SJW agenda that the author agrees with but that rust’s “shadowy” leadership doesn’t.
I mean, it's good to discuss different viewpoints, but programming choices is a hill I would never want to die on.
But, it's ironic (and sad) that the same person who raised the issue of diversity in speakers - who would have been the first PoC doing a keynote - was treated like rubbish and essentially pushed out to the point they no longer feel comfortable being part of it at all. It's also interesting to note that while the issues the voting body had with their talk was solely to do with the content of the talk, it begs the question of if any other participant would be treated the same way in dealing with that issue arising. In my experience it's not uncommon for that sort of irony to play out, but that's purely anecdotal.
Also, of course white is a colour but I've always seen PoC as a slightly more language-open alternative to the previously commonly used "non-white" which feels notably like language from an era long past.
> Political scientist Angelo Falcón argues that the use of broad terms like "person of color" is offensive because it aggregates diverse communities and projects "a false unity" that "obscure[s] the needs of Latinos and Asians".[39][40]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_color
Another criticism I've heard is that the terminology for POC originated among black activists during the civil rights movement in the US who were reclaiming the term "colored" used in the Jim Crow/segregation era, and so it's only really appropriate for black people to use.
The former term (nonwhite) is iffy too, but sometimes it's a better descriptor
To be clear, I haven't heard many people voicing the second criticism -- I think most people using "nonwhite" subscribe to the former point of view
> as if white is not a color
But ‘person of color’ doesn’t include white people in the same way that ‘anti-semitic’ doesn’t include racism against Arabs. Yes, Arabs are also of Semitic descent, and yes white is a color, the meanings are not one-to-one mapped from their components. To deny that is to deny large portions of the English language.
This is pernicious in languages where the writing system has even a little of such character, and leads to stuff like e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_word_for_%22crisis%22
It's OK to use this sort of playing with words in your stand-up routine, (e.g. Tylor Tomlinson's "Lot of my friends are settling down. Some are just settling, period, end of sentence") in a song, a book title, that sort of thing, but we shouldn't pretend we've got a serious argument here, we've got a coincidence maybe, at best.
In most contexts, it doesn’t include Asian people either.
Whoever on the Rust team made the decision to reach out and downgrade JeanHeyd's talk seems extremely incompetent.
Optics matter a lot here and a large portion of leadership roles is optics. It's careless to not take context into account, like the recent history of poor Rust-related optics (E.g. trademark thing) and JeanHeyd (The person they invited) talking about lack of black representation.
https://twitter.com/__phantomderp/status/1662511693136637952
I'm not disagreeing with your overall point, to be clear, but in my mind, leaving the burden of pointing out inequity to victims of it isn't great either. I guess a less problematic approach would be reaching out to that person directly to see if they feel like that's what happened, and how they'd like others to respond if so
[1] https://twitter.com/__phantomderp/status/1662511693136637952
> I haven't even considered this angle until this [other] person's tweet.
You might want to look into the historical basis for this term before you make snarky comments about it. It comes across as dismissive. My understanding is the term "person of color" evolved from "colored" (which originally just meant black (in America at least)) and now encompasses non-white people.
Yes, when you examine the history here it appears neurotic, paranoid, and divisive. But I’m sure a few people have been able to acquire a slice of power from exploiting it.
The rest of us will just continue to politely smile and nod and then roll our eyes and smirk as we turn away.
Trying to expand it into a giant anti-anti-anti-woke frame is a little distasteful. Even if you're one of the people who thinks any discussion of race is racist, can't you just accept that some people view lack of diversity as a problem worth noting and leave it at that? It's evidence, right? Certainly "Rust has never had a non-white speaker" seems like a problem, even if it's not. It's not wrong to note it in passing in the context of another argument.
The behaviour is disrespectful regardless of colour, yes. But someone's skin colour does influence other people's behaviour.
There's a great deal to read on this topic if you're genuinely interested. Otherwise I just want to warn you that the way you phrase this comes across as rather ignorant and stepping on the border of racism.
This aspect is one of the reasons I'm very uncomfortable with all the classification of people into races. There's always a hierarchy implied, even inside the white category, a ranking of more or less white, questionably or unquestionably white etc. It's not the world I want, I don't want to internalize these (unspoken) classifications of people.
Is the US the world's only country?
Throughout the history of the world, who counts as XYZ has been redefined many times to suit the political goals of the people at the time.
I recall when we stopped being Yugoslavian, and started shooting at each other, as Serbs or Croats. The Russian guy sitting next me married a Ukrainian woman a decade ago. Recently Russians and Ukrainians started shooting at each other. There's a great deal to read on this topic if you're genuinely interested.
“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”
Like WTF? Rude. This is exactly the kind of behaviour ChillBill is talking about. Racism is a big deal. You can't just casually be throwing it in anywhere without backing up what you're saying.
What exactly did ChillBill say that borders on racism? Why does that step on the border if racism? Why are you that sure that you'd warn him/her/them?
Them having been on the other side of the saddle, I'd bet they're familiar. How about simply listening to what they have to say without instruction, seeing their perspective and taking it in?
I am all for many of the stated goals of "woke" or whatever you want to call them, but it is really reminiscent of the politician who wants to ban porn but has his entire computer filled with it.
If they believe that thing is wrong and they see how hard it is to resist, they of all people may jump on a bandwagon.
Best advice I have is, avoid the whole situation and have fun. If you really want this kind of stuff to be part of your career, this is what that kind of career path is... lots of politics, drama, defending a title, etc.
Conferences can be good for meeting people, and I guess self promotion. But it's just like anything else, there's going to be people who will do anything to meddle regardless of merit. There's going to be "cool kids" and "losers". If you seek equanimity, you won't find it in a hierarchical power structure.
Blogs are way better than talks anyways.
that is why it is so disruptive in a professional setting, and kills all real honest cooperation
There is a wide wide world out there, and just as having an easy to use crate system is important, so is having a large community. You don't get to a large community by being exclusive, but by being inclusive.
your second point seems trivial, after all let's assume that most of us live and act accordingly (manipulation is bad, and if there's something uncomfortable about a presentation, then it should be directly addressed, etc)
but your first seems very interesting. can you please elaborate on who these grifters are, and how to identify them?
They abuse their influence to demote a keynote selected by the agreed-upon keynote selection scheme, because it makes them “uncomfortable”.
In short, it's hard not to feel like you just got baited and switched, even if the withdrawal is for a good reason. "But you'll still be at the ceremony!" isn't a good argument because that wasn't the original invitation, and because you're putting them in a very uncomfortable position having to decide whether to continue to go or not.
For context, I've spoken at over 100 conference events. There are very significant differences in terms of the keynote speakers and regular speakers — generally in compensation, status, time, and prominence, at least for conferences that are larger than community events. Not all of these may not be obvious to attendees, but overall it's a fairly serious snub to pull the rug out from under someone like this.
If adding some perspective makes me "lacking empathy" then so be it, but I resent the accusation. We can also turn that around: the organisers are essentially being called a bunch of cruel racist assholes here, all without any real evidence. I bet that's fun after an honest mistake, miscommunication, or mismatch of expectations. If we want to talk empathy then no is coming off well here.
Is it though? I can tell you from an audience point of view it almost certainly isn't. Nobody cares very much what "status, time, and prominence" your talk has. Which leads me to ...
> There are very significant differences in terms of the keynote speakers and regular speakers — generally in compensation, status, time, and prominence
So it's an ego thing?
Just give the talk, forego whatever glory you get from it.
Almost all of them had keynote speakers, who received a prominent spot, usually in the morning and on multi-tier conferences the only talk scheduled at that time slot. Based on content of most of those talks the expectation was to take a wider or deeper or just different look at our fields and not mainly present a smaller idea or solution.
But it also doesn't matter if you or I personally do or don't care about distinction. There is one made clearly and as soon as it is made, there is an implicit promotion or demotion depending on which way a person is being moved and one should have very good reasons to demote anyone publicly as they did here.
That's really my main objection to this post; and in the context of the accusations it makes the change of title is not really a big deal, or so it seems to me anyway.
Or to put it this way: if it was me I probably would have been a bit disappointed, but I would also assume that's just the chaos of things.
But like I said in my other comment: I suspect this is really about general dissatisfaction with the Rust team, and that this is merely the final straw: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36102292
I am most interested in deeper technical talks (or cool lightning talks that broaden my horizons) and keynotes often feel like highlevel generic talks that are very skippable - often aimed at CTOs and not engineers. Also, "prominent spot in the morning" is exactly the opposite for me as well, because conferences are all about networking and evening networking means hangover ...
Do most people care if someone was a keynote speaker? No(Outside of academia). Is it a big deal if your talk was selected as a speaker or keynote speaker? No. But should you care if your talk is demoted from Keynote to non-keynote without following due process(and possibly because of personal biases)? Yes.
I don't know anything about any of the parties involved, but I feel like declining the talk was the correct thing to do and raising the lack of due process is also the correct thing to do.
It grants high credibility in the outside world which gets you invited to additional opportunities.
There is obviously some legit cred here, and it's a definite downgrade - but it's not being sent to the woods either. G
Given that 'nobody else cares at all, whatsoever' - that adds context to this which we should include in our understanding. Nobody is missing grant money, or getting a stain on their resume, not getting a job, publicly dragged, meaning the slight is ultimately very personal.
There is a legit grievance here, but it's overstated.
Most gripes have a kernel of truth, the issue is to match up the size of the truth, with the size of the kernel.
You make up your mind about that kind of stuff BEFORE the invitation.
To have that taken away because you voiced a technical opinion some people didn't agree with is petty and childish. It wasn't even a political opinion, and it was public before he was voted on and invited.
If it's purely ego then there are even more serious concerns if ego dominants an entire conference organising committee then withdrawal was the only reasonable option.
For the uninitiated, a keynote sets a theme and tone for a series of talks.
Usually it's less technical and more personal than later talks. Explaining the significance of the topic that will be discussed in upcoming talks.
Maybe it's just been watered down to 'featured'/'sponsored'/'recommended' talk? I haven't been aware of that.
Looking at the schedule for this conference, it seems that there's just a single track and all talks are 30 minutes. I wouldn't expect any substantial changes beyond a different timeslot and title.
I could certainly believe that it means the difference between the amount of attendees, length of presentation, venue, etc etc. In those cases, it's quite a big deal and quite the dick move, especially given the seemingly unilateral process to "downgrade" the presentation.
I think what happened is just the regular chaos, hub-hub, and disagreements that's involved with organising these things; since JeanHeyd himself already indicated he wasn't sure he wanted to give keynote the organisers probably figured it didn't matter much to him. Classic expectation mismatch. For reasons that are not entirely clear to me JeanHeyd assumed "somebody is pulling very weird strings behind the scenes", "shadowy decisions that are non-transparent", and "vindictive behavior". The best explanation I can come up with for that is that this is not so much about this talk, but rather expressing general unhappiness with the Rust leadership, and this is merely the "the final straw". But who knows...
[1]: https://thephd.dev/i-am-no-longer-speaking-at-rustconf-2023
- The very first or very last talk of the day.
- A larger time slot, looking at the Rustconf 2022 schedule, keynotes are 45 minutes long, regular talks 30 minutes. https://2022.rustconf.com/schedule
- The speaker is featured much more prominently in the promotional materials.
- If the conference has multiple tracks, no other talk are scheduled at the same time than keynotes. It's assumed all conference attendees will hear the keynote.- Is the content of the talk suitable for a keynote?
- Given that the talk was accepted as a keynote, is it ok for the organizers to change their mind and unilaterally demote the talk?
https://hackmd.io/mwCWfJpIT024vBYvKeHCtw?view gives an informed perspective on the second question.
People inviting the author knew about the content and the author double checked if they're ok with that direction. This wasn't a surprise or something missed. The original vote was done by enough people who can make the decisions.
What do you mean?
I don't think you're being very reasonable here. A lack of diversity is just a piece of data: it might be complete coincidence, or it might be related to some underlying bias or discrimination. "Calling out" a lack of diversity is just bringing attention to that piece of data. If you want to ignore it, fine. If you want to make a case that the lack of diversity isn't a problem and/or has nothing to do with bias, by all means do so. But you can't just tell people to shut up about inconvenient facts until discrimination is proved in a court of law (or to your own satisfaction, or whatever unstated burden of proof you think is sufficient).
Free speech and dissent is important. You might not like it when people point out obvious and available data like "hey, this group seems to be pretty homogeneous", but that doesn't mean those people should shut up.
> A lack of diversity is just a piece of data: it might be complete coincidence, or it might be related to some underlying bias or discrimination.
I say it's a coincidence. I've known racist people but they were an overwhelming minority and had no power. Let's stop there. Find me a systemic racist in a position of power where I work or participate in local events and I promise I'll fight to eject them from their place of power. Done. Discussion should be over at this point: let's have actionable steps. We don't have them? Let's do something else.
"Might be related to some underlying bias or discrimination" is not a convincing thing to say. Going witch-hunting for witches that are 90% likely to not even exist is unproductive. The Sun's magnetic storms might influence our moods, that too falls in the "it might" category, but I don't base my life decisions on it.
> "Calling out" a lack of diversity is just bringing attention to that piece of data
A lot of people have been "bringing up attention" to many things. What are you doing to help? I had a few technical talks held in my city and in one occasion I insisted the discussion after the talk be in English and not my native tongue because we had just two English-speaking participants in the audience. I am helping in practical terms. Are you helping practically?
Many people in more privileged countries are completely blind to the fact that "raising awareness" is being done ever since the 1970s yet very little progress has been made in many areas (happily racism and sexism were reduced, which is good!). When are you going to understand that somebody at one point should actively do something about the problems and stop "raising awareness" until the heat death of the Universe?
Many people are quite aware of a ton of problems, believe me. I go outside and talk to people of many nationalities and races. The people willing to do something outside virtue-signalling are very few and far between though, sadly. And you strike me as a virtue-signaller.
I realize my tone is a bit combative but honestly, it's getting tiring and at one point I find it hard to talk entirely calmly when the other side of the discussion is content to only repeat the same things like a broken record.
On the one hand you have your "diversity enforcement policy" which is arguably racist. On the other hand you have black Rust developers but never any black speakers or organization leaders (in a community which doesn't hesitate to toot their diversity horn) which also arguably racist. So what gives?
>Personally, I was with the author until that quote. If I was a member of that organisation I too would not be OK being represented by a person that makes such horribly offensive personal opinions known regardless of their technical expertise.
You could ask yourself why something that someone else might see as a simple (minor) disagreement caused such as strong reaction in you.
What is the average level of commitment and capability of <T> in the overall community?
If that is low relative to the community distribution members of <T> may not feel comfortable seeking speaker slots simply because they understand their relative ranking and do not want to potentially disrespect the group or humiliate themselves.
This is completely normal behavior for all <T>. Even in large subgroup most people do not consider themselves worthy of speaking at top conferences.
Then the intersection between "Black people" and "people willing to speak on a Rust conference" is extremely small and nothing can be done about it. Well, nothing that's not already being done I mean: like encourage everyone to be in these circles because nobody is going to show you the door for doing so, and nobody is going to discriminate you.
What else should one programming language foundation be doing? They are not a world government that can and should fight systemic racism. They can only encourage people to participate. Which they already do.
> You could ask yourself why something that someone else might see as a simple (minor) disagreement caused such as strong reaction in you.
Throwing the ball at each others' hands is never gonna achieve anything. I can try answering for your parent poster: because the average white people are getting sick of being blamed of being racist while a lot of places are being racist towards them because they are white and somehow the problems of racism worldwide are our fault.
I've never in my life discriminated anyone on any race or gender grounds and I also don't plan to ever do so. But constantly guilt-tripping whites that they should "fight for more representation" is not how you win them over for your cause. You only alienate them. Tell me this: "please never exclude people from conferences based on skin color and gender" and I'll immediately agree with you, we shake hands and the world became slightly better. But tell me "it's a little more complicated" without giving any context or explanation while still implying it's somehow my fault that there are no Black speakers on a Rust conference, and you definitely have lost me for your cause. I might even start fighting against you, if I allow my monkey brain to take over that is, which I actively strive to not do.
Now, you ask yourself why did you try to shift blame. It's toxic. We can all be better than this. Let's start somewhere already. We got so much more in common than you seem to think.
Or, if I completely misconstrued your comment then I am truly sorry. But I do get pissed off every now and then. We should all just stop blaming people for things that 95% of the time are just not there. :(
When someone mentions a 'lack of Black representation', they're not saying that non-Black members are less valuable because of their skin color. Rather, they're highlighting that there appears to be a systemic issue preventing people of that particular race from participating or advancing in that space. By addressing these systemic issues, we can make organizations more inclusive and more representative of the broader community.
Nobody is suggesting that people are exchangeable units defined solely by their skin color. On the contrary, it's recognized that everyone is unique and has a diverse set of skills, experiences, and perspectives to contribute.
This does not mean discarding merit or reducing people to their race, but rather acknowledging that societal, cultural, and systemic barriers have created unequal access to opportunities. The ultimate goal is to ensure that everyone, regardless of their race, has an equal opportunity to succeed.
In none of those cases was a specific policy or practice identified that would explain the existence of "systemic issues" preventing minorities from getting hired, promoted, selected, and that would justify implementing discriminatory policies (aka "affirmative action"). So ironically we're discriminating against the "majority" (white males) over something that's mostly imaginary, at least in the US tech industry, based on nothing but demographic statistics. The fact that there's fewer qualified people of a certain color (proportionally to overall demographics) in the pool isn't evidence of systemic racism at the level we're operating. Meanwhile you would get laughed at for suggesting that we need gender parity in waste management jobs, or early childhood education.
"Appears to be systemic racism" might be half a step too far. I would say, "The possibility exists. We should look carefully and see if there is, and if so, what we can do to fix it." But we should not assume systemic racism every time there are racially unequal outcomes.
Asians get into top colleges out of proportion to their numbers. Should we say there "appears to be a systemic issue" in favor of Asians? Or should we, perhaps, not take disparate outcomes as prima facie evidence of systemic racism?
I'm not saying that we should sweep it under the rug: "Nothing to see here." By all means, when there are disparate outcomes, look carefully. It's just that the wording went a bit too far, in the absence of further evidence.
It is, however, always the result.
Intelligent people do see it. It’s typically people that have no actual direct value to contribute but still want to score points that focus on all kinds of secondary topics.
On the other hand, there's more going on than what's being told publicly. Perhaps racism does play a role in this. The use of the word "uncomfortable" without clear explanation suggests this is more than just "we don't want another reflection flame war".
It's possible that this person was just hoping to use the keynote speaker as a token of inclusiveness, but I have to wonder if there isn't more going on if racism is brought up after incredible vague notions of people feeling "uncomfortable" being given as a reason why they keynote speaker got demoted to a normal speaker either.
I'm hoping the remaining leadership owns up to their mistake, put out a detailed reason why the purely technical topic of reflection is making them so uncomfortable, and lay out proper measures to prevent this from happening again, with the necessary correctional measures applied to the leadership member who went behind the others' backs on changing the invitation. They'd also need to come up with a clear and honest apology, of course.
If they can't give a decent objective reason why they're so "uncomfortable", or don't get real professional real fast, there's much more drama to be had the coming weeks.
And where do you live that inequities have never existed?
not because there is no racism in the country and neither because everyone is racistic but because the situation in general is very very different
I don't at all mean that the people involved then are at fault, instead: It created structure where Rust community expects Rust leadership to be coherent, close-knit and well connected with the community. It also expects pretty top heavy governance.
I think that is fragile and prone to personality drama when the project grows and the connection with community becomes impossible. A more loose organization would be better. Leaders at the top then don't expect they can steer the project much, teams are independent, the whole thing chugs on with loose governance.
Modern corporate culture expects control, "control of the message" and control of everything. Here we have to release control, it's contrary to other goals of the open source project.
Other communities either try to actively hide problems, or handwave them as "boys will be boys shrug".
In short: gates are there for a reason.
I think it's a confluence of factors:
1) Open source is more about interpersonal collaboration than it ever has been. The lone hacker throwing tarballs -- or patches -- over the fence is dead. Open source projects now more closely resemble "real world" software projects: a team of engineers using collaborative tools, working toward a defined shared vision with management and oversight. Major projects no longer follow the BDFL model, instead using incorporated entities like the Linux Foundation to direct development replete with boards and committees, leading to more "office politics" in how major decisions get made. A tradeoff for the greater continuity and community input a foundation provides.
2) Open source is more diverse than ever before, and becoming more so. More diversity means more perspectives coming to the table.
3) Fully 25% of Gen Z identify as LGBTQ. Among hackers that number is higher; it's likely a majority of late Gen Y or Gen Z hackers are queer. And a significant fraction -- again, perhaps even larger than previous generations -- are neurodiverse. With these identities comes greater awareness of intersectional issues, and greater awareness of oneself as a member of certain classes. Pretending that this is irrelevant to software work -- hsistorically, predominantly a white male dominated pursuit -- is a fool's game. There are going to be struggles and clashes as members of different classes assert their grievances and call each other out.
In short, this kind of "drama" is a growing pain of open source becoming a real movement that invites and incorporates diverse voices. We'll muddle through it and move on.
The figure is 20%, from on Gallup poll in the US and is unlikely to be a global figure.
Jumping from that to a "majority of hackers" is quite a statement to throw out offhand with nothing to back it up. Kind of undermines the rest of your argument which was otherwise interesting.
> a growing pain of open source becoming a real movement
Oh wait, and there goes the rest of it. Diversity issues aside, open source has always been a real and important movement. It doesn't take having a diverse membership to make a movement important, and making that a requirement before you'll take something seriously is quite problematic, frankly. I say this as someone who is generally delighted by diversity and the growing numbers of people who feel safe to identify as LGBTQ.
What the actual f*ck does all of that have anything to do with the topic being discussed?? Unbelievable! This is about a person being demoted by the Rust Project, going against the actual vote of "The Rust Project Leadership", with a slight reference to the race of the person in question being a potential factor - but without any convincing evidence, so it's hard to keep focus on that only - the main thing being already plenty bad enough (the lack of consideration for a person, the lack of respect for the democratic vote...). But going from this to what you're saying seems absolutely ridiculous and makes me question the sanity of anyone making such sort of connection.
A promotion of someone else quickly becomes favoritism, and a demotion or reassignment (or rescheduling) quickly becomes discrimination, even if those decisions were made on a different basis.
A lot of these kinds of public outcries are people of a minority group misunderstanding why some decision was made. Of course there is discrimination, but not as much as some people believe. Most people, in my experience, just dont think too much about skin color, religion, sexuality, or anything, of their employees, speakers, and so on.
As you said, a huge amount of the population, especially in tech, are LGBTQ+ or similar. Its incredibly difficult to do anything that really discriminates, because its not a minority group anymore. Even a very large number of "white male" tech people are LGBT, they just may not care to tell you.
What does typing on a computer keyboard have to do with where you put your genitals? No one cares and most importantly, no one should care. Keep your sexual and romantic life to yourself in a programming community.
>There are going to be struggles and clashes as members of different classes assert their grievances and call each other out.
Thats a bad thing that must be nipped in the bud.
>In short, this kind of "drama" is a growing pain of open source becoming a real movement that invites and incorporates diverse voices.
More like its death convulsions.
And, related to the OP, I believe one reason this ends up being used as a weapon is that it’s so arbitrary, you can never predict when or how it might be sprung on you, so it behooves you to go on the offense and invent the equity issues, vague “discomfort”, and declare others witches in the interest of self-preservation.
Like seriously I’m on a computer remotely discussing tech with people. I don’t personally care about who the other person is or does beyond their contribution to the repo and topic at hand. Beyond that, to weaponize decent behavior as a tool to do additional things, is not right.
Sorry but when can we stop taking “developer advocate” type people seriously? They’re usually not devs or technical (at least in my own experience), and add all these side things which make no sense except in political organizations.
C++ has evolved tremendously so I have no idea what you're talking about there. Removing "goto" would help nothing, and the more or less deprecated features keep old codebases alive while allowing for better things (shared pointers and so on)
I've been hanging around /r/rust and poking at other venues since at least 2013 and my understanding was that the exception-like appearance of panics arose organically from:
1. Let's have monadic error handling for catchable stuff and an ASSERT equivalent for bugs that cannot be reasonably handled.
2. Our ownership system and mutex poisoning allows us to make strong guarantees about where invalid state is observable. Let's let a thread ASSERT without taking down the whole program.
3. It'd be nice to have RAII cleanup on an ASSERT
4. It'd be nice to have automatic diagnostics on an ASSERT failure
5. Gee, it's really awkward to have to spawn a thread in order to be able to translate an ASSERT failure into an error code when we're exposing a C API from Rust code. Let's add catch_unwind. (std::panic::catch_unwind didn't get stabilized until Rust 1.9.)
The clearest expression of this is that libraries cannot opt back into unwinding when the application that depends on them sets panic=abort. If an application says "I have no need to continue with the following job/request/etc. after a programming error in a single unit of work", the libraries it depends on aren't allowed to countermand that and, if they try, it's their fault for abusing panics. Panics are overgrown ASSERTs, not an underbuilt exception system.
If a crate is using panic because it encountered bad input or whatever then the crate isn't doing things in a rusty sort of way. Even if it's a wrapper around an unsafe C library that uses panic everywhere the language has tools to work around that which is not the same thing as having made an inherent, unfixable mistake in the design of the language (by having more than one way to deal with errors).
If you were around the internet when Rust was first being formed at Mozilla, understanding the history there and the transition of Mozilla from a pure tech company to a political organization is part of the story as well
I will say my first introduction to Rust was not as a programming lang, but was one of the many many many posts around the internet at the time where the founder and other core members were defending their CoC, and talking about how they were more focus on the "behavior" of developers than on the code, or technical merits of programming.
Rust has always been more about about controlling human behaviors (i.e politics) than it about controlling computers.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4801226
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4487963
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28712821
It's been a while since the last big drama, but then again, it's also been a while since Ruby was that popular.
I'm still trying to find confirmation of which message it was though. If it was the initial invite that was "issued without authorization", then the revocation would make more sense.
You do what you want but I'm not going to do that.
Sadly haven't been to one in years since they haven't come back to SG
I dunno about you, but when I’m organizing these things the subject matter experts that you invite to take part are more important than the paying guests.
I would absolutely not invite them until I was 100% certain they’d have a spot. If something goes wrong there, it’d be either an extensive excuse or simply 3 keynotes.
It's easy to miss the discrimination when you're not a member of the affected group.
For example, LGBTQ are in a war with a government party who want to put laws in place which directly threaten them. Not giving a shit about them makes it easier for said government party to eradicate them from their country. Sounds hyperbolic but some folks are on a hell-bent ideological mission against non-straight/non-cis/non-conforming people.
So no, it is still easy to discriminate against non-white males in tech groups. It is also easy to discriminate against, but in less proportion, against white males in tech groups. Real life is messy.
Being afraid of disagreement is a cancer in our discourse.
You're not speaking for everyone. I care about the Rust leadership behaving properly for example, because issues like this may be a sign of other problems with respecting the community. And I would like to trust them to resolve issues fairly and quickly since I will rely on the project's progress in the future and don't want people leaving because of mishandling social issues.
If Jim Smith is keynote, great, if they're in a conference talk, great, nobody is going to fathom one way or another but the speaker themselves.
In the era of open source and package managers, this can only be an illusion. It's sort of possible to ignore the community, but if nothing else it will affect the volume and quality of packages available for you. That said, you can keep it pretty minimal, you don't really need to interact beyond reading docs and downloading packages.
I liked JeanHeyd's blog because he is a good writer (but a bit on the chatty side). I also love what he does for the C standardization process. His skin colour is completely irrelevant.
They absolutely were and you can find writing by Ben Franklin in their own words saying so explicitly.
The characterisation of those actions as vindictive seems accurate, but I don’t think the blog post is stating that the actions were racist, rather that it was a missed opportunity to represent the wider population at rustconf.
Whether you think that’s good or tokenisation is a separate matter, the point is that the article is not claiming that downgrading the speaker was racism.
Either way, I don't really see why it would be vindictive either? Maybe I missed some information somewhere, but I've seen nothing that would indicate anything other than the most likely explanation: they rescheduled because they assumed JeanHeyd just didn't care as he indicated he didn't want to do a keynote at first, some petty infighting, and all of this communicated this in a bad and chaotic way.
Re the vindictive part: I read it as someone having a personal issue with JeanHeyd and downgrading him as punishment.
"Here's one they just made up: Near miss. When two planes almost collide, they call it a near miss. It's a near hit! A COLLISION is a near miss. explosion sound Look, they nearly missed! YES, BUT NOT QUITE!"
As a (somewhat) native Chinese speaker, the contents of this page is kind of confusing to me, because as far as I can tell, the original saying sounds correct, or at least not wrong.
If you search online for the phrase "有危就有機" (literally meaning: where there is danger there is opportunity) you'll see many results. It's a common saying (that said this could be due to influence by the English world, who knows).
It's true that "機" by itself can have different meanings, and "in isolation" probably should mean 'change point' rather than 'opportunity'... but that's kind of splitting hairs since the meanings kind of blend together. Also, in Mandarin I don't recall seeing any use of "機" "in isolation", making the claim rather contrived. In my native Cantonese, "機" in isolation usually means "機會" i.e. chance or opportunity.
I also observe that the wikipedia page points to non-Chinese sources that "debunk" the myth. I have no idea why they felt the need to be so pedantic about this case... Meanwhile, on social media we routinely see quotes attributed to Confucius, and sometimes it's a fun game trying to figure out whether the quote was legit, poorly translated, or completely made up :P
Yes an English Wikipedia article will tend to cite English text on the subject, because the assumption would be that it's mostly being read by people in English so text written in another language is less accessible. Also the quote it's debunking is English (it's by US President John F Kennedy), not Chinese.
Cantonese is a bit different from the "standard" Mandarin Chinese, so that's one factor. I also grew up in a very bilingual environment in Hong Kong, and had a short stint living abroad during my younger years (I started primary school in Australia, so I basically learned to write in English before I learned to write in Chinese.)
My schooling is like 80% in English, and even today with bilingual documents I read things much faster in English than Chinese.
But don't get too comfortable, as "people of color" will probably phase out soon as well. My money is first on "BIPOC" (as an initialism, usually sounding out the letters), giving way to "bipoc" (as an acronym, lower case, pronounced /baı-pok/). But I'm too white to make that call, just a guess based on linguistics patterns.
Even "BIPOC" is not without controversy. But afaik, no one has proffered an adequate word to describe "folks that have too much melanin to be considered white".
https://slate.com/human-interest/2016/08/colored-person-vers...
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/29/918418825/is-it-time-to-say-r...
Such a word is not necessary or desirable, because the categorization system it supports is not meaningful or useful.
It is useful and meaningful to talk about the plight and state of, and advocate for, "Group XYZ that has been marginalized and experienced systemic violence throughout history, specifically because they are XYZ"
It is also almost certainly the case that nobody is being actively excluded (well except maybe from a keynote). But appearances matter, and why have a poor appearance that could come from a bad place when a better one is possible?
That's why I'm encouraged that this conversation is happening, because it's the path to the better future.
The only really wrong response to this would be to shut down, close one's mind, and decide that the problem is the controversy itself, rather than the greater social situation of which this conference is just one small part. It's a programming language, it's not meant to solve social problems, after all. But governance and social structures are inherent to programming languages, and they should try to fit into the larger social structure of society (around the world) and if they want to be widely adopted, learn to appeal to wider and wider audiences.
Rust has no leader - and as far as I can tell, it never had a leader. Rust is a motley crew of people who disagree about what rust is and what it’s trying to be fighting it out in unreadable GitHub issue comments.
Who is responsible for the decisions that led to this drama? It sounds like it’s some nameless committee that made bad choices here. But committees of people with mixed political skills don’t average out to being an effective organisation.
Perhaps they should consider a model where the entity has a single logical owner and requests to change its state are made by passing messages to that owner…
In many ways its sort of incredible and impressive how well rust functions. There's probably hundreds of people involved, from core compiler tooling, language design, cargo, crates.io, things like rustconf, steering and governing everything else. The fact that for the most part, it all works to make the language and ecosystem improve constantly is a pretty impressive feat.
It's a respect thing. It costs time and money to produce and give a talk.
That very often isn't visible to the audience. It takes weeks of dedicated preparation to deliver a high-quality keynote talk, and people have day jobs and other obligations. If they're going to travel hundreds or thousands of miles and now have to pay for the privilege, they might want to not be treated as disposable.
That doesn't seem like too much to ask.
It’s like being center stage on the PR poster for the movie and then only being an extra.
Like, being invited to perform on the main stage of the concert with your band, and then later being told you’ll have to perform from side stage 3 instead.
The audience is confused, and the whole thing is just disrespectful, yeah.
The thing itself is not the problem, performing on stage 3 by itself would be fine. It’s the disrespect and incompetence implied by the switch from one to the other.
Status, credibility and respect are real and tend to matter a lot.
It's not "an ego thing".
You can count all the "social dynamics" points you like, but it won't change how I treat what you've said, or how I push what I'm saying. Your statements will be judged on merit.
Perhaps. That is an explanation that fits your worldview. But whether it is true is not so easily determined.
>I've never in my life discriminated anyone on any race or gender grounds and I also don't plan to ever do so. But constantly guilt-tripping whites that they should "fight for more representation" is not how you win them over for your cause. You only alienate them.
In your view _you_ and many other white people have never discriminated anyone and you have never witnessed it and therefore there is no racism. And that might very well be true (except for the last part, racism is obviously still out there).
But let's imagine a country with people living in it. Some can afford to go to university and some are poor and cannot. Now the university is not to blame for their lack of funds. They can truthfully claim that nobody who has sufficient means will be turned away. Also the majority of those poor people are white. The university simply says, we are not discriminating against any whites, they simply don't have any money! And this is also true. But they could also offer some scholarship which would greatly benefit some people who can't afford to go to university.
It seems you and parent are interpreting someone saying, there aren't any black people in your conferences and you should take a look at that, as saying: there aren't any black people and you are to blame for this and you are racist. Maybe some are actually saying this. But this (people being racist) doesn't need to be the case and I hope my example sheds some light on this. This is what I meant with the situation can might be complicated.
I think indeed as you said we don't need to blame people so much. Instead we can try to look beyond blame, and beyond our own perspective, and see that even without us being racist or doing anything wrong, there can be some injustice and the situation can be improved. Then if we throw our hands up and say well we ain't the government that is one thing, but being against someone else's initiative that may improve the situation is another.
You just demonstrate how hard it is to discuss with you because NOBODY SAID THAT. I even included pieces of context in my parent (and other) comment(s) and you still ignored it.
Racism and various other discriminatory actions absolutely exist. Why do you accuse people of lack of basic common sense? Do you think you'll make allies this way?
And finally, why is the Rust Foundation the place to try and fight stuff all over the world? It comes across as opportunism; previously oppressed people using any and all channels as a megaphone. Rust Foundation is inclusive which is already HUGE progress. Can we leave it at that and move on? I wanna be back to a programming language foundation, being, you know, a PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE FOUNDATION.
Outrageous, I know. Surely I will again be made to look like I am the ultimate nemesis of... somebody.
> and see that even without us being racist or doing anything wrong, there can be some injustice and the situation can be improved.
I am asking again: what does that have to do at all with the Rust Foundation? It's a programming language foundation, not a world-wide charity fund-raiser that aims to eliminate all exclusivity around the world.
IMO let's get our scopes right first. Otherwise all discussion flies out the window, as has been evident throughout the several threads made on this topic on HN already.
There’s lots that could be done that don’t fall in to your description of affirmative action.
Invitations could be extended to people to submit proposals for a talk. This already happens, but maybe the circle gets expanded once it’s evident that the circle has been too small. The simple act of asking is often enough to make people feel welcome.
I also call BS on the claim that you’ve never discriminated against someone. No person is a saint like that. Every human and sentient creature has inherent biases.
Maybe you’ve never actively discriminated, but you most surely have passively done so at some time in your life. For anyone to claim they are perfect in this regard is only fooling one’s self.
That you then go on to say that it’s not there 95% of the time withoit any actual reflection on the matter perhaps shows that you’re not well versed enough in the dynamics of race and gender relations to make that call.
By that logic, white would be homgenizing as well, or? Someone from Prague has little in common with a person from Massachusetts or St. Petersburg.
POC is homogonizing because it's reducing the space from N strata to 2: white and non-white, blending n-1 strata.
Per wikipedia:
> Stratification is the process of dividing members of the population into homogeneous subgroups before sampling. The strata should define a partition of the population. That is, it should be collectively exhaustive and mutually exclusive: every element in the population must be assigned to one and only one stratum. Then simple random sampling is applied within each stratum
Using this definition, white and non-white are mutually exclusive, while location of origin forms a different axis for comparison.
In more social sciences, you might look to intersectionality for an explanation.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratified_sampling
[1] https://www.nasponline.org/resources-and-publications/resour...
Although, my perspective is of course informed by how I've internalized my local community use this language in certain ways. In South Africa, where white people are just 8% of the population, it seems stranger to make reference to the subject through that caveat rather than in, say, a US context the inverse may seem more uncontroversially worded.
Interestingly, as a side, I'm considered coloured in South Africa - a term taken on here by mixed race folks as a disambiguation of the American term, in a similar fashion to how you describe the origin of the PoC term.
- Dark-skinned descendant of American slaves, living in the US
- Dark-skinned recent immigrant to US from Africa, whose parents were important government officials, and one of whose distant ancestors sold slaves to Europeans
- Descendant of Navajo Indians
- Descendant of indigenous Hawaiians
- Descendant of Japanese Hawaiians
- Decendant of Japanese immigrants from turn of 20th century, who were interned in a camp during the war
- Japanese immigrant who moved to US in 2005, for university
- Son of migrant Mexican farmworkers
- Descendant of conquistadores whose parents were top executives in a large Mexican corporation
- Lebanese Muslim immigrant
- Lebanese Christian immigrant
- And so on…
What interesting characteristic do these people all have in common, that "white" people don't also share? Absolutely nothing, other than that they don't tick the "non-Hispanic white" box on stupid USian forms.
No, my statements about zealots in the rust community, are not generalizations. Rust has more zealots, than every other language combined.
Note, advocates are not the same as zealots.
Every single Rust dev I've worked with is a normal programmer who prioritizes merit and rational process.
If you're already unfriendly towards the Rust community then this incident will only deepen your bias. I urge you to not assess the community with this flawed thought process. Rust devs are like all others.
At no point did I claim it did.
If you're already unfriendly towards the Rust community
Where did I state this?
It seems you are touchy on this front. And it seems as if saying that the rust community has some zealots, upsets you.
Most other dev languages don't even have "communities".
You're getting evidence directly from someone who is a senior member of the Rust community and who participated directly in the original decision.
Imagine you hear a series of bangs, walk into your living room, and see Alice holding a smoking gun and standing over Bob's bullet-ridden dead body, holding a note saying "I wish Bob was dead".
One response is "well, we don't know what Bob did or if Alice actually pulled the trigger". Another response is "um, Alice, can you explain why you seem to have shot Bob?", and if Alice doesn't want to explain anything, you might start to draw inferences. But either way you might not want to hang around Alice until it gets cleared up.
That’s leaving out the important context that it’s just the latest in a string of senior members in that community who have been disgruntled enough to quit. The entire moderation team quit all at the same time. Since then the leadership team has been “an interim leadership”.
Rust governance has been an ongoing shitshow for at least several years.
As someone who’s not directly affected since I stay well out of “the community” I’m less concerned about “community drama”, but as someone who makes (and will be held responsible for) long term strategic technical decisions for my company I can’t help but wonder if I want to hitch my company (and my reputation) to a language run by the sort of people who’ve let this drama fester for so long. Is some language feature going to be voted on, implemented, publicised, become a critical dependency in my codebase - only to get rugpulled by some anonymous core team member like this keynote speaker? I mean, probably not, but Rust leadership sure as hell haven’t done anything to earn my trust and seem to actively be working toward eroding it. In ways that I’ve never even had to question to myself about the leadership of Perl or Python, or even Java.
Seems a very immature way of dealing with things. Recent phenomenon or am I just becoming callous in my old age?
Being invited as a keynote speaker lends you credibility and status. It means you have been acknowledged as someone worthy of giving a keynote. You may not care about this, but other people do.
To downgrade someone from a keynote speaker to regular speaker is extremely disrespectful. Especially someone that you invited.
It makes it seem like you are toying with this person, and based on JT's account someone on the Rust team was toying with JeanHeyd because they went behind the rest of the team's back to downgrade his talk.
It's like giving a child a toy then snatching it back. It's just cruel. Whether it was a mistake or not doesn't change that.
One wrinkle I haven't seen called out is whether this was a paid speaking event (I assume it was) and if the demotion came with a part cut. If there was a pay cut that pretty shitty IMO, and does get a bit closer to losing ones job.
Of course you can just not care and let people walk all over you every single time, but that’s not a healthy strategy either.
Here is another independent person blowing the whistle on rust culture.
https://hackmd.io/@XAMPPRocky/r1HT-Z6_t
How many times will this happen before people take it seriously?
I'm fully prepared for some horrendous revelations in the future.
And we'll all claim to have known nothing and seen no signs :)
---
It's not censorship, it's lack of resources.
We're volunteers. When it's too much work to moderate a thread, we just nuke it from orbit.
-- matthieum @ https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/13tsmht/jt_why_i_left...
This reminds me of an episode in Scrubs where one of the residents volunteers to announce bad news to patients or family [1].
Several patients later, the lead doc tells them, "... if you could stop worrying so much about who does and doesn't notice... you. Even for a second... that'd be good; that'd be real good."
Their plaintive explanation previously was, "I just wanted to be colleagues."
It wouldn't surprise me volunteers pick up diplomatic work, and it just doesn't jive like a computer program at all. With humans, who knows what we are getting into?
Should we have goals up-front before we dive into open-source? Whether it's for respect and recognition, or a completely selfless quest for the good of a project we care about, or something else.
Maybe we just love to write code; the project is cool; and we just want to be involved.
I guess we have to be ready when the system does not behave like we expect, and we can't QA behavior or choices. That's the hard part of soft skills.
[1] Season 2, episode 4 (S02E04), My Big Mouth
Transcript: https://scrubs.fandom.com/wiki/My_Big_Mouth_transcript
If so where is the transparency and accountability?
Who was the individual? Why did they do what they did?
If they do not represent project leadership, what will be done to fix this situation and prevent similar problems in the future?
If they do represent project leadership, why weren't the changes and the reasons for the changes communicated better?
A group of people mysteriously calling the shots in a closed room ultimately alienates the community and will stifle the long-term success of Rust.
The accountability must happen and shouldn't be ignored, and I hope that various parties step forward to handle the mea culpa responsibly, but it's a bit early to grab the pitchforks, light the torches and march to the town square.
Fair enough.
How the situation is handled matters, so I suppose we will see.
But that's exactly what I'm saying as well. Not sure there's something to learn, that's what's confusing me here. Black people didn't attempt to speak at a Rust conference.
Well... OK? What's there to learn from that? As far as I'm aware, the Rust community is one of the most diversify-friendly ones out there already.
—-
My decision to leave was driven by witnessing the negative impact on JeanHeyd resulting from the actions taken by Rust. The situation raised concerns about the treatment and the breach of trust that occurred. It made me reflect on the role I played in the development of the system and whether I want to continue to be associated with it.
—-
No weeping, no histrionic claims of betrayal.
The underlying problem seems to be: sidestepping democratic processes. IMO that is what should be addressed first and foremost.
Which is the case here.
The thing is that the people on here taking about “being adults” are the least tolerant or understanding that people experience things and express things differently.
It's normal for people to mention their romantic partners in casual conversation. Straight people do this all the time. So it's really really hard to interpret this request as anything other than a request for LGBTQ people specifically to hide the fact that they're LGBTQ from their coworkers.
Examples of straight people doing this:
> I have to leave early today to pick up my kids from school.
> I'm taking pat/maternity leave because we're having a baby.
> Can I bring my husband/wife to the team social?
- Gay people can have children as well - Gay people will also take paternity/maternal leave? Refer to the above point for this one - This one is the one where people usually just substitute the word "wife/husband" with "partner"
Again, none of this has anything to do with software engineering or programming languages in the slightest, so why bring it up?
As for why people bring this stuff up, I think that reduces to the question of why people make small talk. I don't know, but they do.
But for native Chinese children, learning Han characters is a matter of cultural identity :) Also, once you've spent the time learning it, the ability to comprehend ancient Chinese texts up to ~2500 years old is pretty nice. Most people don't need to do this (but I do), but it's kind of a culturally accepted overhead of keeping the cultural continuity. I think most learned Chinese teachers recognize this "problem", but it's just accepted as a fact of life, and I don't think it's gonna change any time soon.
I personally paid this "cost" too, Chinese was my most dreaded subject in school, and I while I never had any issue recognizing/reading characters, I couldn't hold them all in my head and I'd often forget how to write random characters (up to this day it happens - and I've written a lot of stuff). It's not a problem now because on a computer/phone I can type the pronunciation and I'd find what I wanted, but still.
FWIW, note that in the countries that used to be influenced by Chinese Han culture (Vietnam, Korea, Japan), they all used to have some form of Han character writing system, which then they subsequently switched (fully or partly) to a pronunciation based system. Outsiders rightly think we're nuts to keep the existing system, but it's just not gonna change.
My point is the same: most people don't care (and I mean 99.99%; what we've seen in the last days is basically high school drama and no aduy takes such feuds seriously).
The only real danger is that strong contributors leave. We the working Rust devs could feel that at some point in the future.
But even that possibility isn't that scary. Rust is quite mature in many ways already. Most innovation happens in libraries at this point.
Also systemic bias exists. That’s not an arguable point because the US has a history of anti-black rules like red lining that affect opportunities till this day. Or rules like how women could manage their funds that held women back. Other countries similarly had rules like that against various demographics.
Things are better but generational issues still exist. The history of these things isn’t even so far ago that most millennials would be somehow unaffected.
Equal opportunity was the right idea and technologies like the Internet helped equalize the playing field to the point that socio-economic background matters less than ever. Now we're regressing back to judging people first and foremost based on their skin color, sex, and even sexual orientation. I see my company's DEI leader making shameless statements saying that they will make sure to promote more "people from underprivileged groups" (that means people who are not white or Asian by their own definition) with no apparent regard for performance or merit. It's racist to a comical degree.
I think assuming that the anonymity afforded by the internet extends to real life is naive.
> And it seems as if saying that the rust community has some zealots, upsets you.
First saying "more than every other language combined" and then changing tone to say "some" is disingenuous. And please don't try to technically argue that the former doesn't have to more then the latter - the underlying insinuation is pretty obvious.
Further, most languages barely have any advocates, let alone zealots. Rust is a massive outlier here.
My statement is accurate, valid, makes sense, and is predicated upon observation.
-- another version by ChatGPT
https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/13tsmht/jt_why_i_left...
Do read the full thing, but it roughly boils down to "If it happens at a time/on a day of the week when we have more moderator bandwidth available, we will make use of it to be more lenient. In the worst case it escalates to targeted harassment, and I promised myself to never let another 'Actix developer harassed into hiding' incident happen. Was it heavy-handed? Yes, and I wouldn't do it lightly. Also, I expect that anyone who really wants to know what was deleted can go to Reddit mirror/archive sites and the case you're referring to was the first time I had to act since Reddit surprised them by shutting down API access for the Pushshift service they relied on."
Those threads don't happen everyday either
I think the bigger reason is that Rust tends to go to great lengths to avoid drama and overemphasises kindness a bit too much, which somewhat paradoxical seems to invite drama like this. Things that should be said are left unsaid, pressure builds up, resentment and suspicions linger.
The entire Rust moderation team resigned a year ago, without offering a reason. Who knows what happened, but if three people all resign on principle then it sure gives off a certain smell, and it's not a good one. Being more open would have invited drama, yes, but now the lingering vibe remains "there is something fishy with the core team, but we don't know what". This sort of "there is something but we don't know what" seems to be a recurring theme in RustEnders. I'm all in favour of the goals as such, but I'm a lot less sure that the methods actually achieve that.
In addition: kindness also means being forgiving of the unkindness of others (within reason, of course). People sometimes seem to forget that. Everyone is an asshole sometimes.
You just summarised 98% of all current cultural problem in Silicon Valley.
For some people, crying is just a way to deal with emotions. So please don’t judge.
I’ve been a professional software developer for more than 20 years. I still find myself weeping at work once in a while, especially when overwhelmed with hardship and negative feelings. I don’t see how this would be a sign of living “a very protected life.”
Also, this is definitely not true—-a spouse cheating on you would be a “betrayal” but I wouldn’t fault anyone for weeping over it.
This further emphasizes OP's point—nothing the Rust team can do to you should approach the emotional impact of marital betrayal.
It’s already barely acceptable in a purely American context. To me as a European, this is extremely off putting and culturally out of line which is a recurring problem with Rust.
* Person is invited to talk
* Person asks "You know about X, right?"
* They say "sure, it's no problem"
* They talk in private and take decisions in improper venues
* The guy is slighted at the last minute, told it is because of X
... is an all too "professional" way to do it. This is how professionals will do it, when they want to let you know they don't like you. With a little deniability, but not too much. If what the complainant alleges is true, there are too much social skill at work here - skill at exquisitely snubbing someone.
I am a bit out of the loop (I don't know who the people involved are), but I tend to agree, I think. Sounds like a mix of miscommunication and group politics. Those are things that people might get upset, but the exaggerated response sounds like a cheap appeal to raw emotions.
In our paroxysm of righteous correctionism, we've lost track that that is really good advice, even though crudely phrased.
Part of adulting is responding proportionally to childish behavior in others. Events like this feel like my toddlers fighting—he takes her pencil so she tears his paper so he hits her so she comes crying to mommy.
The adult in the room deescalates, they don't write an emotional blog about how betrayed they feel on behalf of someone else.
The real question is if the Rust project has an equitable governance structure that minimizes imbalances of power or if it doesn't. If it does then the author should follow that instead of a large angry blog post. If it doesn't then he may as well go with the large angry blog post.
Though “downgrading keynote to talk” is obviously not the same as an outright disinvite, the fact that the original invitee asked explicitly about this content being pre-RFC (giving rust leadership the out to resolve this amicably!), just makes it hard for me to say “oh this makes sense”.
Perhaps this is inevitable in some sense if the critique is not brought up earlier. But it’s something that feels really avoidable if people were more honest about their own feelings on other peoples work.
Of course that gives them a certain level of power of the discourse, but what is the alternative? Community-voted conference structures that fail to take many variables into account that you need to take into account for an enjoyable conference?
If I were invited as a keynote speaker and the conference organizers tell me that the stuff I produced is good, but not suitable for the keynote I wouldn't blame them, but myself. The only instance I could imagine was if they invited me specifically for a spicy topic and my talk was too spicy for them. But a tech talk? Come on.
There was somebody who circumvented the intended governance structures to make this happen, and this is probably where the frustration and this blog post come from.
Consensus attained by a shouting match?
Do the Rust community really feel this is acceptable?
Everyone seems to hate it, so I can see that it's possible it's "just" bad leadership (which is a big deal of course).
As a result of the current geopolitics, we don't have the self-awareness to realize that minor conflicts are minor conflicts and that the absolute best place to be and thing to be doing is spending time at home with your loved ones.
We certainly shouldn't be carrying out PR strategy wars against our colleagues like is happening here...
1. English is a Germanic language, not a Romance one.
2. Even for speakers of Romance languages, knowledge of the ancestor language doesn't really make a difference. Does it help a modern English speaker to know that silly once meant "blessed by God"?
3. The notion that Latin is somehow more logical than English is a pervasive one, but it has absolutely no evidentiary underpinning. It's pure classist bullshit.
The Internet gives you unparalleled access to information. There's virtually no barrier to learn about a subject you're interested in, especially software-related. You don't even have to be able to travel to a public library nowadays, which is what I did as a kid, reserving time slots on public computers to access the Internet. It's easier than ever to teach yourself a skill like programming, as well as build a portfolio through open source contributions, and that certainly directly translates to work and public speaking opportunities.
Have you been judged by the color of your skin and denied opportunities ? I have.
the internet doesn’t do anything for me when people can see me.
Yes. I'm pretty sure I've been judged for every single one of my identifiable immutable characteristics. For my skin color, out loud in the street, for sure when I lived in a place where I was the minority.
> and denied opportunities
Do you mean directly, aside from that conference where white males were told to attend less, or my employer openly favoring people who are neither white nor Asian in upper ranks? If so no, no one has told me that I couldn't do something specifically because I'm white. Have you? In what circumstances? And was it an isolated event or evidence of a systemic problem?
The lack of emotional (and explicitly confrontational) experiences in modern society are underdeveloping skills to deal with them.
Consequently, you get childish spats over what should be a technical disagreement, because people aren't comfortable saying "I think you're wrong, but I respect your opinion. Here are the reasons I think you're wrong..."
As the quip goes, anonymity and the lack of physical presence turns everyone into an asshole on the internet -- and then we raised most of the world on the internet.
They could (or should) have been more transparent with communicating their reasoning, but again: Anyone who has ever organized any decently sized event knows that in the end the buck will stop with whoever has to do the actual work. And if you ask me (you probably didn't), giving organizers that power and trust is generally reasonable. They have the best insight, they have to carry the consequences if it does not work out, etc.
Of course that trust can be lost and a community can decide to let other people organize their event next time. But the way I see it those made responsible for an event should be able to shape that event.
You still seem to be missing the point: Which “organizers”? The ostensible “Leadership” of the project – which one would think should be the final arbiters of any such organizing – did want the guy to do the keynote. The real issue here is that the stewardship of the whole project, to put it in sophisticated technical terms, sucks if some grey eminence can undermine the official leadership just like that. Then their whole code-of-conduct, leadership-by-committee, woke-and-adapted-for-Modern-Audiences governance foofarah is just flim-flam, a sham, a lie.
That's the real issue here.
the same goes for favouring people in your job. If you have a systemic issue in your place of work, then report it.
But otherwise people are chastising the person in question for pointing out that there isn’t diversity in representation. So what? They’re not meant to even mention what they think is an issue because somehow the systems are just and fair because of the internet???
Anyway I won’t be responding further. I don’t think you actually care about understanding or supporting equality, or letting other people prosper if they’re not your demographic.
The fact that you think the internet is an equalizer of opportunity just shows how people here don’t actually want to understand the issues people in other demographics go through.
Edit: ah and of course the reply below is it’s the minorities fault they’re not represented enough. This is why I don’t care to respond to people who are so deeply rooted in the idea that the world is somehow a just and fair representation. It’s the same argument for decades.
Prioritizing non-whites and non-Asians for things like university admissions, employment and promotions is the same thing. You're not just giving your preferred groups the opportunity to compete, you're lowering your standards for them and raising them for the disfavored groups, creating barriers based on an immutable characteristic, which is skin color. Plain and simple racism.
You don't have to post your alleged experience with racism if you don't want to, but to then imply that I am racist for sharing mine and asking you to reciprocate sure is disingenuous. For the record, I care about equality, which is why I reject equity, since its implementation is predicated on the discriminatory policies that I described.
The point is more that this sort of unilateral decision should never have been possible to make in the first place. It should have been discussed and voted on before the talk was downgraded.
Perhaps that specific incident is inconsequential, sure. I think even the speaker agrees so. But the fact that this lapse in process could happen within the Rust foundation at all is a red flag for other, more language-specific dangers.
I mean, I hear you. I understand what you're saying, I just don't understand how you (or others) think this is related to the technical aspects of the language.
But the RFCs are written and reviewed by people. And they need to have the feeling that the work they do isn't useless because the one who actually decides is somebody else who hasn't been involved in the process at all until the very end. It's ok having somebody being able to veto stuff, but this must be known and communicated beforehand - "yes, that's ok for us, but $PERSON has the last word on this so we have to await his approval".
People don't need to be perfect, but if people are going to REPRESENT something (ie the Rust Language) they need to be better than the petty drama that the Rust team has been involved in over the last while.
Except (in my opinion) it's not, if the set of people responsible for the progress of the technology you(and mabye your company) are going to be using are able to make such terrible decisions, it opens doors for far worse on a scale where you will start to care(take a look at the code of conduct stuff(edit: I meant the trademark stuff); if they went ahead with it, which is very possible if they're willing to sidestep all ideas of democracy, then there would be some notable repercussions).
We can expect some mildly bad decisions on the language evolution. But it's very unlikely that this will open a niche for another language to replace Rust.
It's a bit of manipulation as nobody stated that having emotions is bad. Meanwhile, people leveraging unverifiable claims of bad feelings to hurt somebody is apparently ok... unless that somebody is you, of course.
It seems to me that OP feels like he is forced out by this behavior. To be forced out of a project you put your heart and soul into over several years, that can hurt.
Also the governance of the project is important if you want to invest in the ecosystem. These are the people who make the decisions for Rust. If you want to rely on Rust, you better trust them to make the right ones, and this here is (ostensibly) a strong example to the contrary.
It’s unprofessional I guess. For the sake of Rust’s future, it should probably get better stewardship. If you agree to let someone speak then you should honour it.
How so? Me, a random Rust dev, can't ever make any difference in how is the foundation governed.
But, if you are telling us that the Rust leadership will e.g. actively follow this very HN thread and base their policy on it then yeah, then I'd agree with you.
My 0.02 is that we live in a time where we are losing site of communities and focusing on individuals. Your comment appears to be an example of that. Human beings are adaptive and successful in general because they effectively work together. If you want to think about that idea, one of the things I've been pondering is how the Ukrainians have stood up to the vast power arrayed against them?
You can find countless research papers out there that present a brilliant idea devised and implemented by a skilled individual that ultimately goes nowhere despite its merit. Skilled individuals still need community to expand their work to the scope that will allow the idea to really shine.
(Note this is not meant to minimize Graydon's contributions to Rust's success, but to highlight the general principle that ideas require a community to grow into greatness)
Comments about how someone just doesn’t care about something is the worst kind of comment.
> I left because when I felt JeanHeyd's pain and disappointment at being mistreated and betrayed, my heart broke. I wept because of the cruelty. But I also wept because I helped create the system that could do this to someone.
This shit does not come off as authentic even a little bit.
I'd err on the side of believing people, unless and until they prove themselves to be insincere. Which is very much not the author's reputation, as far as I know.
People can be melodramatic sincerely. There's no reason to look for cynicism here.
I wish they would lay off the power tripper stuff, but that’s what you get at this level/size. Coming from where it’s coming from, it’s arguably going to be hammering itself out for awhile yet, while the world is already using it just fine… you may see splintered community though
We're teaching our children to respond appropriately to conflict—in the situation above, either one of them can deescalate by approaching the conflict reasonably. He could have avoided it altogether by asking nicely for her pencil. She could deescalate by recognizing that he really wanted her pencil and making a trade that they both are happy with. It's hard for them to do because their escalatory actions feel more immediately effective at bringing "justice", but they don't work out in the long run.
The cycle of childishness isn't going to be solved by a post that triggers an internet mob, that's just another childish response in the cycle.
Again you're using an example of two children who are equal in power dynamics. Now try having a child deescalate an angry adult. Most people would not find that a reasonable request.
[0] Still listed as such here: https://www.rust-lang.org/governance/teams/core
[0] https://www.rust-lang.org/governance/teams/core
[1] https://rust-lang.github.io/rfcs/1068-rust-governance.html
So they need reverse psychology to express anger at injustice because of the Code of Conduct? What is this world we're building?
It's the same as the world that existed before.
A hundred years ago I would be going to mass on Sunday just so people thought I was a good Christian. Now I nod my empty head in fake agreement to all the "progressive" nonsense being spewed in professional circles.
Well, except here. This is essentially a throwaway account with no ties to my professional self. "Give the man a mask and he'll tell you the truth" sort of thing.
There were groups that still tried, but they were all too weak. The cultural conservativism of the 80s had no real hold anymore, and the political correctness of the 90s was mostly a joke. People would make fun of their opponents, but everyone openly disagreed. You wouldn't be fired from your job, or banned from otherwise unrelated communities.
We really thought that the internet was going to keep making this better. Instead we ended up with the most restrictive and widespread regime that has existed in most of our lifetimes. Luckily that seems to be losing its hold, but the specific doctrine isn't really the point. The frustration is that we had something closer to the ideal, however imperfect, and completely lost it, and have almost an entire generation that has been taught to think that that's a good thing.
Be direct. No bullshit. Don't worry about offending anyone, including the project leader; just say what needs to be said about the technical merits of whatever is being discussed. We're all here to [insert project goal]; let's do so with a minimum of drama.
But it's probably better to continue to not have a CoC, and just quietly lead by example instead.
And it kinda sorta works.
That’s not saying that CoCs were not a kind of response to some pathological behaviors in online communities: you often are going to get either socially inept man-children, or people on the spectrum, and there are kindergarten-level conflicts. You get programmers who attach themselves to their work too much, have very strong opinions, and often will treat a set of rules as a puzzle you need to game, without much concern towards any consequences.
But my oh my, do lots of popular CoCs look like solution for that problem invented by the same kind of socially inept man-children who are the part of the problem. They likely have read the word “empathy” in a dictionary, but don’t understand what it means in their bones.
I have an even less charitable theory of what CoCs might be about, really, but for now I’m applying Hanlon’s razor and stick to what I’ve stated above.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, open an issue about the code of conduct.
All of life is change and cycles and oscillations. Not just human society but even whole ecosystems. Very likely this approach will be pushed to extremes, implode and then the cycle will swing the other way. There are valid reasons for this cultural shift and like all such shifts those supporting it need to experience the failure of going too far. Eventually some less extreme equilibrium will come about.
Everyone is free to nope out. And people noping out is something that Rust (the community) needs to take into account. _Because_ it depends on them. But as is.. I’m unsure if this kind of emotional involvement is even something Rust (the project) _should_ want
Also, my understanding is that the consensus among the committee was to invite and then one person broke that consensus. You’re characterising this as a careful, considered decision made by all of Rust project leadership but that might not be the case at all.
There basically is no other usable compiler than the official rust compiler. So it has this 'leadership' thing that ... C never really needed
No, Rust is winning because it is 40 years younger than C and 30 years younger than C++. Rust incorporates advances in computer language design that C/C++ cannot adopt without breaking backwards compatibility. Rust is winning despite its leadership rather than because of it.
EDIT: elaborated a bit more.
Conflict resolution is hard! I struggle with it as an engineer who wants to please everyone, but I also recognize that it isn't possible to.
Whoever had objections to the talk and was not able to express those objections to their teammates in the proper forum before taking action without their approval is just... immature. It violated trust amongst the Rust leadership team, and trust is everything.
It’s actually even worse, because this person also wielded enough power to represent Rust to RustConf, and did so incorrectly. They seem problematic.
Leading people is always messy and requires the maturity to deal with failures gracefully, and a catastrophic failure from a simple task is not confidence-inspiring. I love Rust, so I hope they get their shit together.
Hmm, not sure about that one. Rust has an enormous hype component to it, more than any other language I'm aware of.
It may have strong technical leadership, but saying it's gaining market share "precisely" because of it is precisely misleading.
Like many other modern languages, Rust is a mono-implementation, where the same organization is both developer and standards committee, while at the same time trying to fund itself (without revenue from either standards docs or the compiler) and balance external commercial and non-commercial interests.
There are advantages and disadvantages to each approach, but they are very, very different. (and in a world of cutting edge open-source compiler technology, I'm not sure the approach which resulted in ANSI C is even viable today)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessne...
Which is even worse than an explicit hierarchy, because it provides more gray area for people with power to do things anonymously.
I mean, someone bullying some veterans/old men because they're "woke and feminist" isn't going to earn any sympathy from me.
nowadays... "woke" just means "I'm better than you (so I can/will do things that are otherwise unacceptable to you)"
...I think we chose the wrong word. Rather than "woke", it should have been "NO BULLYING" -- which includes all things the real "woke" people tried to do, and forbids all things the wrong "woke" people are trying to do
Too big to fail can easily also mean too big to fix.
Failure is often not the worst outcome -- at least failure creates space for a fixed alternative to arise in the space left open.
Really? Nothing against a thing that leads to hypersensitive intolerant mob behavior and authoritarian/anti democratic tendencies!?
It’s like saying you have nothing against eugenics in theory, but the leap to how that can go wrong in practice is painfully obvious.
Or “I have nothing against giving everyone a million dollars in theory”. Obviously that is a dumb idea, so why even say you have nothing against it “in theory”.
It is very difficult to use the terminology even though it is the most accurate, because conservatives are the most loud adversaries of it, but they are just hateful racists, bigots, ableists, sexists, transphobes, homophobes, islamophobes, xenophobes, etc. Which of course invalidates everything they ever say.
Similarly "white supremacist" is often used as an insult on the inverse side, even for groups that don't believe in or desire white dominance. If someone actually does believe in those things, though, it's still a totally fine term to describe them.
I'm not sure what SJW or "woke" means in this context. They cancelled a black man because they felt "discomfort" over him being the keynote speaker.
There's a reason people don't want to talk about racism, and it's not because it doesn't exist anymore...
IMO the root actually comes from the very heavy social signals that were utilized by the Rust team early on (you can read a lot about them through the core team's reddit posts atp, especially under threads about the code of conduct). This effectively became a beacon for many people to gravitate towards. So when you see these sort of very dramatic disagreements that's laughable to anyone outside of that bubble, it's because that's the type of people Rust was (unintentionally or intentionally) beaconing.
https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/vxgzrl/changes_in_the...
Mod response:
> For all those wondering about removed comments, there was some trolling going on which was summarily removed by the mods.
> Please avoid any trolling and/or drama seeking comments and remember our subreddit rules.
"Trolling" on display in the archives of that thread: https://www.reveddit.com/v/rust/comments/vxgzrl/changes_in_t...
And then there's Graydon's reply to the "we will exclude you," in the code of conduct, and the subsequent drama: https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/6ewjt5/question_about...
Frankly, even though no one has asked for my opinion, the amount of effort people put into the code of conduct (and the discussion around it) is ridiculous; utterly ridiculous. In a time long ago, before everyone was incapable of compromising and cooperating with one another, we had two rules in an informal code of conduct for interacting with one another:
1. Be cool
2. Don't be an asshole
And then we all went back to trying to achieving the task at hand.
Online communities have a natural tendency to turn inward and become disconnected from the original purpose of the community. A good measure is how much meta/political stuff comes up in every thread.
Perhaps you should re-evaluate these assumptions and actually listen to people before you dismiss them.
I’m not seeing any obvious solution. If one member of the leadership team does something stupid on a Friday, it can only be resolved by Tuesday or Wednesday. Folks are going to pick up their pitchforks on Sunday and say that “leadership failed”. Sure. But I don’t see a way around this.
Edit: I used the term neurodiverse and then implied we all fell into one category of personality. That seems to conflict, but what I meant was that we didn't differ much in the way that we differed. It was a gatekept community of a certain category of people where the gatekeeper was just interest in the subject absent any monetary motivation.
An awful lot of people didn't have the luxury of being openly gay in the 90s and 2000s. Depending on how old you are, this is naive at best or disingenuous at worst.
Are you talking about Iran or Florida? :)
But more seriously, your overall response is quite cryptic. I can’t answer for the ‘activist left’, whoever you take them to be.
I think it has more to do with social media culture, which seems perpetually hyped emotionally.
You can't release a press release without claiming to be absolutely super excited for you guys about $mildly_interesting_new_thing. You can't run a non-trivial YouTube or TikTok channel if you don't over-emote wildly all the time. [1] IG is full of people who are incredibly #amazed and #grateful and add the hashtags to prove it.
I'm currently watching a YT series where some people visit abandoned parts of London tube stations. There's an insane level of constant emoting. It's like children's TV. Everyone is smiling and happy and just fantastic, and everything they see is awesome, amazing, incredible, and absolutely their favourite thing ever.
Which is weird when they're mostly just filming dusty old abandoned corridors, some of which have some historical interest.
If this is normal for you, you can't say "I really don't like what happened so I'm going to resign" without turning it into a widescreen tentpole weepy drama movie experience.
However or whenever this happened it's clearly normalised now. I think we're going to be stuck with it for a while.
[1] I've known people who tried to cut down on the emoting and their stats went right down.
It seems likely that there are other important factors. It's debatable what they are, but clearly there is a difference of opinion about how much Rust's leadership accounts for why Rust is succeeding more than most.
I don't think it's fair to entirely dismiss either, there really is a lot of incredibly toxic behaviour in communities labelled "woke" (and agreeing with further up the chain, I can't help but feel being a bit less "inclusive" and demanding some commitment to the product might help, gatekeeping be damned). But we should strive to accurately describe what those behaviours are.
There was no "leadership team" for Rust at Mozilla as far as I know. It was originally a one-person side project like C++ or Python, then it was elevated to an official Mozilla internal project as its potential in the context Gecko was understood by the higher-ups. But again, as far as I know, whatever culture formed around the project did so organically, but also as a conscious attempt to avoid many cultural issues seen in other OS projects. And mark my words, the Rust community as a whole is genuinely friendly and welcoming compared to almost any other internet community of similar extent, and there's nothing sinister underlying that friendliness as far as I can see.
When Mozilla got rid of Rust, the leading technical contributors continued as they had always done (albeit now with considerably fewer full-time paid contributors), as an independent self-organizing entity, but now even less accountable – in regard to technical decisions – for any external stakeholders but the Rust community itself. But some organization was required to foster Rust's growth, to manage all the inconvenient legal things, the interaction with the now several large stakeholders and funders such as Google and Amazon, and so on. So the Rust Foundation was created to manage all that. But the foundation's jurisdiction ends where the technical aspect of Rust begins – all the technical teams are still exactly what they used to be, accountable only to the greater community.
At any point, anyone could have experimented with different implementations with no "committee" saying what to do, but let's face it: first, modern compilers, even simple ones, are extraordinarily complex compared to an early C compiler running on a PDP-11, and second, in light of the first, Rust didn't grow in popularity nearly fast enough for anyone else bothering to write an implementation to experiment on.
No matter, the point is that nothing has ever stopped anyone from writing a competing Rust compiler, certainly not any imaginary "committee." Nothing except the fact that, besides mrustc, nobody has bothered because why would you do that?
sure, merit plays some kind of role, but so do many other things. what so many comments in this discussion (and every other discussion surrounding this issue over and over and over again ad nauseum) really seem to want to ignore is the many other factors that play into long term group/project success.
merit alone? hardly ever, if ever.
If some dirtbag got angry about being passed over for a promotion, got offers for a new gig, and then rage-deleted prod at 5pm on their last day, you get to blame that dude at the post-mortem.
I, like you, suggested that the process needs to be improved but I’m not sure how.
Of-fucking-course it was sabotage, and of course they should be fired as all hell.
We should not whitewash the past because the present isn't what we want.
Coc seems like a law thing but who is enforcing it? Laws you have democratic elected people voting which laws, you have police checking if people follow them, courts giving out punishment. See they are 3 separate entities for a reason. Coc is written by the org, enforced by the org an punished by said org. Doesn't seem like an improvement.
Also, lots of behaviour can be pretty shitty without being illegal.
The past that I lived in was comprised of people you personally knew; not anonymous membership in a large organization or group, where you could never hope to know everyone on a personal level.
There was very little opportunity for people to be unchecked dicks to one another, because you saw everyone consistently and could easily notice when something was going on.
Perhaps this is an unsolved issue about scaling human communities?
If I've learned anything for Reddit mod culture it's that when you see super involved rules on the sidebar it's still ultimately just post-defacto justifications for whatever emotional mood the mods are in that day. The longer the rules = a good measure how aggressively the mods gatekeeps their community for things that go well beyond the scope of what the community was originally about.
This is how things like Programming becoming lower priorities in such communities than personalities/views of the people running it.
Instead of a tool to be used to solve problems local to an organization or an event, it's wielded as a bludgeon in always the most public way possible (either by the org/conference or target of the CoC itself) and time and again this has shown to be bad for everyone and an endless source of drama.
> Some people, naturally, feel that the norms spelled out in the rust CoC makes them feel excluded. To which all I can say is, yes, it's true: the rust CoC focuses on behaviour, not people, but if there's a person who cannot give up those behaviours, then implicitly it excludes such a person. If someone just can't get their work done effectively or can't enjoy themselves without stalking or harassing someone, or cracking a sexist or racist joke, or getting into a flame war, or insulting their colleagues, I suggest they go enjoy the numerous other totally viable language communities.
Hm... So, if someone just can't get their work done effectively or can't enjoy themselves without going behind the backs of the whole ostensibly “Leadership” group, what then? Has that person been ostracized yet? Have they even been named?!? (I sure ain't seen no sign of it.) If not, why not? There seems to be a hyuuuge amount of effort being expended to spare that person's feelings...
Which seems a) misdirected AF, and b) all too typical of these “governance by namby-pambyism” CoC committee organisations that everything on the Internet appears to have turned into in the last half-decade or so.
[1]: Disclosure: I'm a minority (disabled), but I'm also a white man.