Trio of Rust Core Team members hit the road | Hacker News Reader

Trio of Rust Core Team members hit the road

theregister.com

83 pointswalterbell40 comments

This seems to be relatively drama-free, compared to the last departure (off the entire moderation team https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29306845), or they've learned there lesson that it's better to not say anything drama-inducing if they won't give the full story.

Speaking about that, anyone know why the moderation team left by now? Has anything became public at this point or it's still anyones guess? There was some indication that some core member broke the Code of Conduct but was never "punished" for it, could this be the consequence that we're seeing after ~2 months?

Florian is commenting on the reddit post[1]. Sounds very drama free for them (the singular them.. not the plural... sigh).

[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/sh7erp/changes_in_the...

> Sounds very drama free for them (the singular them.. not the plural... sigh).

I don't quite understand this line, would you prefer they identify as multiple people? Or is the objection to using the singular them in general? There is a large historic precedent for using a singular them for people you for whom you are unfamiliar with their gender. Not even trying to be "woke" but if there was someone named Terry(about equal likelihood of being male or female), it makes a lot of sense to use "them"/"they" instead of "he" or "she".

Edit: did you mean that for the other members it wasn't drama free?

I think they just meant that in this context them is ambiguous, meaning they are forced to clarify in this case. A regression in API. One that would be nice to see fixed in the next release.

If you're troubled by the ambiguity of singular "they", I would like to invite you to share in the use of my boutique third person plural neopronoun, "th'all" (objective "all'em"; possessive determiner "all th'all's").

It's the perfect neologism for these factionalist and accusatory times, indexing no one's gender other than your own, insofar as it identifies yourself as someone who has a use for it.

As for the Rust team, th'all have contributed mightily to the advancement of the industry and to the open source community in particular. I wish all'em the best of luck in all th'all's future endeavors.

Ok, I just read your last sentence out loud, and I reckon I sounded like a cross between Colonel Sanders and Yosemite Sam. Thanks for the laughs!

> third person plural neopronoun, "th'all"

What we need is an unambiguous set of third person singular pronouns. "They" and "them" is already a fine set of gender indifferent plurals. It's "he", "she", "it", "his", "hers", "its" that we're having problems with.

I feel like the current release of English can handle this fine. "It was very drama-free for Florian: <reddit link>" If you don't know someone's name, it could have been "it was very drama-free for at least one individual: <reddit link>".

I kindly ask that we please leave this passive aggressive culture war stuff off HN

Seems to me mutual respect and such niceties of civil society as being kind, respecting pronoun preferences, avoiding derogatory language, etc. are essential to making HN a worthwhile place to be.

Online I use "they" or *them" quite often when talking about people whose username doesn't reveal their gender (and quite frankly this is the default).

So I am not sure why people have negative feelings about people unwilling to communicate themselves as member of one gender for one reason or another. If someone feels that way, they very likely have a metric ton of friction with their surroundings anyways — which is in itself certainly quite unenjoyable and certainly not something people tend to desire without a huge internal urge. Calling them "them" doesn't cost a lot (especially considering that we do this with strangers on the internet already) — why not just do it?

I know people that have the general assumption that people want to be called by another pronoun for neferious reasons like a implied urge to "get attention". But I think this is not only a oversimplification, but also a statement that rarely describes the reality of the person they talk about if you do the research a d actually get to know them and their reasoning.

> which is in itself certainly quite unenjoyable and certainly not something people tend to desire without a huge internal urge. Calling them "them" doesn't cost a lot (especially considering that we do this with strangers on the internet already) — why not just do it?

I don't think anyone here, including myself, is objecting to that. I'm objecting to the generic identifier being both plural and singular and can lead to confusion in contexts, as in this case.

I really don't care about the whole identification debate. It's no different to a name to me. However as is often the case i don't know what they prefer, and i don't care to look it up, i'm just trying to be generic.

I just thought: maybe I don't care because my first language is German and there "sie" means "they" while the formal version of "you" is "Sie".

So if you ask a stranger in German you basically end up saying the english equivalent of "could they tell me what time it is?" for a english variant of "could you tell me what time it is?"

To make things worse "sie" is not only singular and plural depending on the context, it also is the equivalent of the female pronoun "her".

It's "free for him" according to https://foundation.rust-lang.org/posts/2021-04-08-introducin...

Yea i just didn't care to look it up tbh. Generally i avoid such information about people and try to be generic. Though in this context it was ambiguous imo

We in the Rust community owe all three of them a great deal for their many contributions of software and community involvement. I owe Steve Klabnik for turning me onto Rust in 2017 with his blog post "Five Years with Rust"[1]. Five years later he is heading into a new chapter of his life with Rust. Here's to another five years of Rust evangelism and activity.

[1] https://steveklabnik.com/writing/five-years-with-rust

Something about Steve Klabnik's communications always carried a lot of weight for me and lent a great deal of credence to Rust as a whole.

What do the core team members do? I mean in more detail than:

"Managing the overall direction of Rust, sub-team leadership, and any cross-cutting issues"

...as found at: https://www.rust-lang.org/governance/teams/core

Do they have regular meetings? If so, are there notes/minutes/video published from these meetings? Is there a list of edicts that the core team has decided on? Is the core team a voluntary or paid position? Who decides the core team membership? Who decides how many core team members there should be? Does the core team make tactical decisions (like Rust 1.7 shall have support for architecture X)? Is there a document from the core team outlining the current "overall direction of Rust"? Do they control what appears on the rust-lang.org domain? Do they control any funding that might be distributed to the other teams? Is there a potential better name for the core team? Executive team? Strategy team? Many people seem to believe that the core team members are working on rustc, but I don't think that is accurate.

You can implicitly figure out what the core team does by going to https://www.rust-lang.org/governance and seeing what team does what.

Otherwise, a good way to understand how Rust governance is happening is by reading the various RFCs, I think this one is the most relevant one for you: https://rust-lang.github.io/rfcs/1068-rust-governance.html, specifically the "Core team" section: https://rust-lang.github.io/rfcs/1068-rust-governance.html#c...

Thanks, that is interesting. Does anyone know where the charters for the teams are located? This is called out in 2021-Roadmap:

https://rust-lang.github.io/rfcs/3037-roadmap-2021.html

...I'm not seeing the 2022 Roadmap, is that still in the works?

They certainly used to have regular meetings. https://www.youtube.com/c/RustVideos/search?query=core%20tea... shows meetings up to 2020-09, though I don't see any since.

(That's about the time of the big Mozilla layoffs, so maybe the person who used to upload the videos moved on then.)

See also yesterday's discussion about the original blog post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30151923

What struck me is there were no replacements named or even hinted at. Anyone know what the plan is moving forward?

Three people joined and one left the Core team in the second half of last year.

https://blog.rust-lang.org/2021/09/27/Core-team-membership-u...

Steve Klabnik is an HN regular and I always enjoy his participation on rust posts. I hope that he will continue to enrich the community.

Fully agree, his posts are insightful, clear and precise, I hope he remains involved in the community.

Given the title and vibe of the article, could its closing sentence be worse?

"Founding members of the Rust Foundation (kicked off in 2021) include Microsoft, Google and AWS."

How hard can it be to craft a clear, clean closing sentence?

News articles are not typically written like formulaic school essays where you state a thesis, support the thesis, and then conclude. They are instead written as if the reader could be whisked away at any moment and so the most important information must be front and center. Less relevant asides get tacked on the end. It's written to be read by busy people, in other words. Which is actually pretty cool.

In my experience, really dang hard. In high school I agonized for hours about concluding sentences. I've gotten slightly more skilled, but I mostly solved the problem by lowering my standards.

something very nasty must have happened for moderation team then core people to leave like that..

also it is very sketchy that some people here want to hide/minimize the story as much as possible

i remember everyone was being VERY VOCAL about the .net foundation "drama"

you can see how pro-mozilla this website is in general, very sad for journalism and internet in general

> also it is very sketchy that some people here want to hide/minimize the story as much as possible

a) I don't think anyone expected people to stay with Rust for a decade or more

b) I don't care about Rust governance that much

c) I don't care about the .net foundation or even know wtf you're talking about

I assume most people are a lot like me with regards to the above. I've been using rust since 2014, I've met many people across these teams, spoken at and attended conferences.

None of this just feels like something I should worry about. If it were 2015, yeah, I'd be worrying. It's 2022, Rust has grown beyond the tiny group of people who had to shepherd it.

They did a wonderful job - that's why I'm not worried. They succeeded in bringing Rust to mainstream, where now there are so, so many people invested in it.

In which way does this news relate to Mozilla?

Don't forget that Ashely Williams, one of Rust's Core team members, is cartoonishly sexist and racist: https://archive.md/VEtHu

The Rust reddit moderation team actively removes any and all "negative" comments about her.

Lol how did I know this "sexism and racism" was about white men before even clicking

> Lol how did I know this "sexism and racism" was about white men before even clicking

Because we've all become accustomed to expect it from SJWs like herself. You're only making my point for me.

Just calling blatant racism and sexism out was enough for you to make a throwaway and post a reply to my factual comment. Out of the woodwork comes the triggered snowflakes. Sad.

How do I know you showed your partner's boyfriend this post, seeking his approval

"Heh I sure showed that chud! Hope he thinks next time about posting uncomfortable facts online!"

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