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Comment by SagelyGuru | Hacker News Reader

I am really not interested in your current US obsession with identity politics.

I care for a well designed, well performing language, which Rust appears to be.

I could not care less about what is the colour of people writing it, their sexual orientations, or how well represented they all are. It may seem relevant to you but it certainly is not to me.

I don't even know what cis women are or are supposed to be. Are they good designers and programmers?

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> I don't even know what cis women are or are supposed to be. Are they good designers and programmers?

"Cis" is just the opposite of "trans". It is an adjective or prefix. Most people are cis.

So, normal people?

>I could not care less about what is the colour of people writing it, their sexual orientations, or how well represented they all are. It may seem relevant to you but it certainly is not to me.

Well, you can certainly ignore all that and just use the language. Nothing forces you to do these things, they're just forcing themselves to do these things.

It's a small faction of people that self identify as cissomething. Much of modern cultural discussions are about language: what is "marriage" for instance, what does "gender" mean, what is "racist", what is "privilege". Asking people to give up and use someone else's language is unfair. In different ways respectable thinkers like Orwell and Chomsky say language is very important.

And I think the position being espoused but misunderstood is that people would like to take different approaches to promoting diversity (perhaps by being personally inclusive and politically neutral) but these sorts of codes of conduct are not conducive to those approach. It's not fair to say this is the way to improve the situation. Or that the situation can be improved this way at all. It may be shocking to people comfortable in American coastal culture, but this sort of thing is controversial (look at this thread!) and unnecessarily combative to people from other cultures.

Furthermore, it's not inclusive to many people because it takes a specific viewpoint in many complicated but intentional ways.

>Well, you can certainly ignore all that and just use the language. Nothing forces you to do these things, they're just forcing themselves to do these things.

I am old and non-native English speaker and I love Rust. Thus I would have liked to participate and I could have ticked some of the boxes. The funding to a conference of my choice would certainly have been very welcome.

Then I tried to reflect on it more honestly. Does my age and my not so good English really make me into such a valuable contributor to a Rust conference? I do not think so. Other qualities might but you do not list those. So I ended up excluding myself.

To clarify then: when I wrote that I am not interested in your obsession with identity politics, what I really meant was that, as a condition of active entry to the Rust community.

Not OP, but at my workplace, we never discuss sexual orientation, race, religious belief or gender of coworkers, because that would be very unprofessional.

So, no, I can't ignore all that and just us the language. I can't use a language in a professional context when I consider the core team to be unprofessional. But that's a nice social experiment and I'll probably use rust for my personal projects.

Good designers and programmers do care about people of all ages, colors, orientations, genders, and ability. If tech is to make the biggest positive impact possible everyone must be on board.

I did not say that I do not care about people. I said I do not care about what type of people have written the language. Do you see the difference?

When I use Rust, I don't even know what was the colour and sexual orientation of every person that has written every part of it. Why do you think I should know that and care about that? What makes you think it is relevant?

Agreed. If we care about diverse perspectives, we can't imply that there's only one way to care about people.

this comment is so tone deaf... just because you don't care doesn't mean that the non-inclusive communities surrounding Rust / programming in general is a significant barrier to entry for many people

That's a pretty harsh way to respond to someone expressing another diverse perspective. Different cultures have different concepts of propriety and politeness. One person's "tone deaf" is another's "respectfully forward". We can't ask for diversity while demanding people adopt our particular cultural norms.

Obviously you are interested in identity politics, because instead of passing over the bits that bored you in silence (were you otherwise riveted by every other bit of the article) you felt compelled to take time out of your busy day to post this.

To expand the point, hopefully less snarkily: making specific statements about how politics are 'uninteresting' to you is itself a political statement ("Your politics are not worth talking about"). In a weird way, I agree, in that the rest of the post appears to practically have gone undiscussed in order to allow commenters to harrumph about words like 'cis'.

Or, more succinctly: a big clue about what someone is interested in is what they are claiming they are not interested in. The things people are really not interested in, they don't talk about. :)

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