Insane that something like "Diversity / Inclusion" is ranked as second when there are real issues with Rust (I say, as a Rust programmer that enjoys the lang).
On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog. If you want to do something cool, I don't care if you're male/female/nonbinary/black/... You can be an purple with orange speckled snail, for all I care.
Now I've seen how e.g. some female gamers were treated, and it wasn't pretty. You should be able to play a game online, without being invited for sex or screamed at every few minutes. That kind of behaviour is very clearly not OK.
But neither is it OK for people to scream their sexual preferences around and demand my attention for it. Go ahead, fuck with who you want, but leave me out of it. Give me the permission to not care about your gender identity. Starting to scream at people because they think 'people who menstruate' is ridiculous, that's also not OK.
So please, do something cool, react if you notice something not OK. But also care for individuals, leave room for multiple opinions and don't start a witch hunt for any minor or even imagined faux pass. Live and let live.
But there is a bigger movement around woke/lgbt, especially in the USA, and political parts of ict groups are very much subscribers to this view. I think it's weird for rust to even have stats about it, just like I would think rust to be weird to have stats about who is a coffee/thea/cola/nonternary drinker. It should not be relevant.
Feel free to write about your preferred drink in your Twitter profile. If you personally come over to me, I'll make sure to have that drink in my house, otherwise I'll perform the noble art of not giving a fuck.
There is also a huge amount of imposter syndrome kicking about. It's important to garden new contributors of all kinds to make sure the best people can grow. While I have no data, I'd easily believe that dogs and snails have way more and severe imposter syndrome than cis white hetero males. So if we do want to make sure that all kinds of people can break through there's little harm in keeping tabs on the issue.
There are probably other impediments to contributing that I don't even know about. They should also be found and addressed, right?
In the 50s, 25% of software engineers were female; now, it's, what, 3%. Why is that?
The "meritocracy" position focuses on who can produce the best code _now_. What if we take a longer view?
I would love it if we planted the idea in 9-year-old girls' heads that Computer Programmer is a job they could do. That way, in 15 years, we'll have a broader talent pool.
I'm skeptical that is quantifiable. But would the "meritocracy" advocates accept some level of token hiring, at some level of reduction of quality now, in search of a greater meritocracy and greater quality in future?
Of course everyone should be able to choose the job they like. I am not going to purposely plant any ideas in anyone boy or girl. Let them sample everything and choose what they like. I am not going to push them.
And a level of token hiring to have more females? Sorry, that's nonsense. Why would someone female not be able to be the best? If you're scared of bias, put some woman in the intervieuw and ask them to review candidates. I've seen genius level woman who would program circles around most males(and most females). It is insulting if you think woman need lowering standards before they have a chance, even short term.
BTW, the biggest producer of 'female equals dumb' style jokes was a female programmer in my last job. Most of us males just ignored her when she started like that.
In the UK, women aren't taking CS degrees. That's why I mention pedagogy. There's something in my country's culture that is planting the idea that girls don't code. "Planting ideas" is also the basis of teaching - it doesn't imply "pushing them" and it isn't opposed to "letting them sample".
I haven't come across any female devs at all in my company. We have diversity of skin colour and sexuality but not sex. So we haven't got any females to sit in on technical interviews.
Please, don't straw-man me as suggesting that female devs cannot be the best. My point is that there _aren't any_ female devs, and it looks like it's because girls _aren't interested_ in becoming devs, and here at least that is due to social conditioning afaics. You really missed my point there.
Keen to know what's different in your locale.
Rust community is small and thus mostly welcoming, plus there were lots of non-binary programmers.
Did that change while I wasn't looking?
> Rust's diversity numbers are terrible. They are even terrible compared to the tech industry, which is terrible to begin with.
I guess they have real numbers about it, but did not share.
I am also surprised because the Rust Foundation staff itself seems pretty "diverse"[1] (at least the male/female rate... nearly everyone seems white though), yet it seems they still didn't manage to make the Rust community as diverse. I guess you can't just "wish" things into existence... systems programming has always been (mostly white/asian) male-dominated and Rust can't change that by itself.
The FLOSS community, by and large, is also known to be a lot less diverse than the tech industry as a whole. I'm pretty sure that both are significant factors. OTOH, it's quite likely that Rust is already doing better than the C/C++ community on these metrics, which is perhaps the more meaningful comparison.
See here for more information: https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/vhvb4m/2021_annual_su...
The organization, sophistication, and effectiveness of the Rust marketing vehicle would trivially win political contests as big as a United States Senate race.
vi/emacs, c/c++/java flame wars are as old as dirt, just like left/right politics in any polity you care to name with ballot stations. But where I live in the US, e.g. MAGA (or it's prototype "Tea Party") was Something New, and those that failed to realized that we'd changed paradigms got, pardon my francais, fucking clobbered.