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Comment by fivelessminutes | Hacker News Reader

'Core team' as a concept naturally leads to elitism.

Does it? I am not familiar with the Rust language development but I read it as "team that takes care of the core (of the language)".

Well, you either have a explicit hierarchy of people working on something, and then the people who are a part of the "top layer" can sometimes start to look down on the ones who belong to the layer below, seeing them as less knowledgeable or not producing useful output. Sometimes that leads to people starting to close down into their current layer, and forms "us-vs-them" groups. Or, you have a implicit hierarchy and basically the same thing happen but the layers don't have names.

> "top layer" can sometimes start to look down on the ones who belong to the layer below, seeing them as less knowledgeable or not producing useful output

So? Are you going to blame them for seeing the reality as it truly is?

This is what humans do.

From the website[0]:

> Managing the overall direction of Rust, subteam leadership, and any cross-cutting issues

This sounds to be more of an "executive team", but I am also unfamiliar with Rust development, so I don't know how accurate that is in practice.

0: https://www.rust-lang.org/governance/teams/core

When it comes to naming, then from time to time I tend to look at C# and I got impression that there are:

"Language Design Team"

"Compiler/Roslyn Team(?)"

"CLR Team(?)" yada yada

so more product/role-driven naming schema

Equally well read as "all others are non-essential" -- tantamount to "subordinate". Guaranteed to seed resentments among those outside the "core".

The social fix would be to change the name "Core" to "Base Language" or some such. Perhaps fork off a separate "Ecosystem" committee with broader representation.

Bona fide: Was once myself on the other side of a "Core" team boundary.

What is the core of a language? Is it the specification? (excluding the standard library?) Is it the compiler frontend or the backend? Or both?

Have you talked to people that evangelize Rust? The whole community is elitist, starts at the top I guess.

Almost anything in the real world that works and is not dysfunctional is built on hierarchies. Where hierarchies are not explicitly spelled out they are implicit and without accountability - "some animals are more equal than others".

How to promote on merit and not nepotism or corruption is the hard problem.

Do you want a competence hierarchy or a political hierarchy?

That's the question our society is facing.

Thinking they can be separated long term is very naive.

First, competence itself is subjective and hard to measure, especially for the very broad task of language design and stewardship. Which skills and credentials are considered most relevant and who's judging them is already "political" (e.g. do "hackers" get stuff done, or are winging it? Is someone with a PhD in PLT the most qualified, or an ivory-tower academic?)

Then there are human factors. Programmers aren't deterministic stateless coffee2code transformers.

Some people will dislike other people, for a broad range of reasons that may be valid or not, and that will affect their judgement. Also many projects and companies have to deal with "asshole geniuses". It's very "political" to decide whether you kick out someone who writes good code, but scares away other contributors.

"Corporate politics" is not thing set up on purpose, but it's a meta-game that emerges even in organizations that are supposed to be purely meritocratic. There are people who will consciously play this game, and have an advantage over people who naively think the game doesn't exist (I'm not endorsing it, but saying it's a phenomenon that orgs need to be aware of and actively deal with instead of declaring they're apolitical).

It also leads to getting things done.

> elitism

You are saying it like as if it were something bad.

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