Why I Left Rust | Hacker News Reader

Why I Left Rust

jntrnr.com

861 pointsSmileyKeith783 comments

Wait. Let me get this straight.

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?

Much less weight should be given to someone "feeling uncomfortable"

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."

Agreed, that part was a little ehh for me too. And I think a resignation is a complete overreaction, but hey, I'm not close to any of these people so what do I know.

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.

Is it bad of me to say I really just don’t care?

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.

From my understanding the Rust team was involved and they sidestepped democratic processes put in place to make sure the Rust foundation doesn't kill itself with unchecked mismanagement essentially.

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.

How? Everything is done openly on https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs

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.

Because the same people are involved, and they knowingly sidestepped these exact sorts of processes without care. It might not be important to you, but this seems like a red flag to many.

> Everything is done openly on https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs

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".

If leadership acts so carelessly with regard to matters concerning a human being in such a shady and disrespecting manner, why would they act less careless with regard to technical matters? Will they just enforce their biased opinion, ignoring valid and generally accepted technical arguments? Rust leadership sounds a bit like the elite leadership of a communist state. I'd prefer an open dictatorship over that.

Notable in this backlash that this happened Friday evening/Saturday morning. So many of whom you’re characterising as the “elite leadership of a communist state” might not have seen this yet. They need to coordinate, build consensus and speak with one voice. I expect that might take a couple of days so they might have a response by Wednesday or so.

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.

No, I am not presenting this as a careful, considered decision. I was just responding why this incident could possibly also reflect on technical matters (not saying that it actually does). I have no clue what went on exactly. But clearly leadership somehow failed in this incident. Looking forward to hear more about how exactly this has happened.

It’s possible to characterise anything as a leadership failure because the buck stops with them. But I don’t see what they could have done differently other than all being available on weekends to troubleshoot issues like this.

If just one person inside leadership fails, that's also leadership failure. If that's the case, most likely the remaining leadership will distance itself from this soon enough.

I’m less interested in collective blame/punishment and more about “how do we prevent this from reoccurring?”

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.

The solution is to pick better leaders. This should never have happened in the first place. Whoever is responsible for this needs to go.

You must be fun at incident review. "The solution is to hire better engineers. Our root cause analysis shows that this should have never happened in the first place. Whoever is responsible for this needs to go."

You’re missing the distinction here between incompetence and malice. One member of leadership acted maliciously; the fact that they were successful indicates that leadership as a whole was missing some controls (formal or otherwise). The latter party is analogous to whichever engineer accidentally brought down prod, whom our post-mortems should not blame—but the former is not.

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 agree with everything you said. I think you meant to write this to the other person. They kept trying to blame the entirety of leadership for a leadership failure and suggests “picking better leaders”.

I, like you, suggested that the process needs to be improved but I’m not sure how.

Ahhhhhh, legit, sorry. I’d read “whoever is responsible for this needs to go” as referring to only the malicious party—but “better leaders” does indeed suggest the GP wants multiple heads to roll.

You read it right the first time. I am just referring to the malicious party. By saying "better leaders" I mean get rid of the malicious part of your leadership. That will result in a better leadership, thus "better leaders". I must admit, maybe I am expressing myself a bit too mathematical here.

If the incident review shows that it is due to sabotage, how would you deal with the responsible person?

And how can what they did – presenting their own decision to other organisations or levels of their own organisation as if it were the legitimate “Leadership” consensus decision – how could that be anything other than a conscious and intentional act on their part, i.e, to use your term, “sabotage”? It's not like it could somehow be an accident, is it? “Oops, I slipped and fell onto my keyboard and these somewhat coherent and grammatically correct e-mails went out”?

Of-fucking-course it was sabotage, and of course they should be fired as all hell.

>Why people having emotions (eg. The person above, who does care) is somehow a bad thing?

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.

> I really struggle to understand why: 1) I should care (I don’t, currently)

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.

People are literally calling it out. Nobody's obsessing.

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 called being an empathic human being

Part of empathy is realizing when someone is authentically upset, and telling that apart from when they are being cynically melodramatic.

> 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.

You're right, it's not authentic or to be taken at face value. But that doesn't mean that there's not some authentic meaning that's being clearly communicated here. Look beyond the surface message!

No, don't, because it's not good to normalize such manipulative ways of communicating.

I think he’s just calling somebody an asshole.

Keep in mind that the author is on the spectrum, and the way they process emotions might not be the way you process emotions. Different cultures, different thought processes, different feelings.

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.

>It all seems so fabulously irrelevant

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).

It means that, like everything that started at Mozilla, Rust will have some uncomfortable growth phase and then mature at some group that may or may not be the original one.

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.

Only thing I can really see is mabye go/zig gaining more adoption but I don't think we're even close to that point yet, what's worrying is even discussing something like this happening in the first place. Ideally this sort of thing shouldn't even cross our minds.

Go is garbage collected so it’s unsuitable for the domain. Rust isn’t going away, no matter how many social snafus the steerage folks create.

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

Cause and Effect. You say "Rust is great". Why? Because People who work together effectively created Rust. And people working together have created most of the other things that are great. So if you want Rust, better Rust or more Rusts, then you may want to care whether the Rust organization will continue to work together effectively.

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?

Or maybe Rust is great because Graydon was (presumably still is) an exceptionally skilled language designer and implementor. An increased focus on individuals makes sense to me because advances in technology give individuals more power, and it makes sense to me to minimize the overhead of coordination by making the most of that power to accomplish greater things with fewer people.

Did Graydon write the Rust analyzer? Did Graydon personally pen all of the documentation (let alone the books and tutorials) that contribute to Rust's usability? Rust is great primarily because it has a community of contributors that all work in various fields of the language to make it what it is. The sheer volume of work that needed to be done to get Rust to where it is today could not be shouldered on the backs of a small collection of skilled individuals; coordination and collaboration is essential for a project like Rust.

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)

I think being apathetic about it won't solve anything either. An expert leaving a is a big issue as that brings about the underlying rot in the committees way of handling bad or fool hardy behavior from a mob. You maybe should care a little given the flaws it exposes in their processes or lack of managing the human element.

> I think being apathetic about it won't solve anything either.

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.

You should care because this becomes more and more the reputation of the language and as it pushes more and more talented people away the staying power of the language (and its ability to be "great") begins to diminish.

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.

This. I have avoided rust so far because I don't like the community around it and the reputation it's building. This type of drama really does effect the ecosystem.

As Rust the technology becomes increasingly important commercially, Rust the community will become more professional one way or another. Large companies want calm and predictable management of their core infrastructure. They have multiple levers, some overt, some less so, for getting it. Rust's leadership will either adopt professional standards of business conduct (as Linus did) or it will be replaced (like W3C was). There's too much riding on Rust now to leave its future up to emotion and chance.

So what can we who use Rust, but don't have those levers of power, do to help accelerate this professionalization?

You cared enough to comment on it.

Comments about how someone just doesn’t care about something is the worst kind of comment.

I appreciated the comment, because I feel the same way.

> "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."

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.

What are you saying? ”Suck it up.“?

He is saying “be an actual professional and don’t bring a vocabulary pertaining to intimate discussions to the public sphere when what’s discussed is a technical conference.”

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.

It's a dog whistle. What the OP is actually saying is that he's extremely angry and pissed off that this was allowed to happen, and he's noping out for that eminently understandable reason. But if he said that in no uncertain terms (as a European very well might in similar circumstances!) he might fall afoul of the official Code of Conduct for being aggressive and threatening towards other contributors. Hence this weird talk about intimate "weeping" and "pain". Make no mistake, this is not some softy empath talk but quite the opposite!

> What the OP is actually saying is that he's extremely angry and pissed off that this was allowed to happen [...] But if he said that in no uncertain terms [...] he might fall afoul of the official Code of Conduct for being aggressive and threatening towards other contributors.

So they need reverse psychology to express anger at injustice because of the Code of Conduct? What is this world we're building?

> 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.

You're basically correct. The frustration many of us have, largely people slightly older than the core HN crowd, is that for a brief moment in the 90s and early 2000s we didn't have any of this dogma that could demand you nod along. You could be openly gay, openly Christian, conservative, leftist, or apolitical.

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.

I think that's mostly true. The rise of New Atheism seemed to coincide with the start of decreased tolerance. Coincidence or cause, I'm not sure.

It has nothing to do with New Atheism. You will find just as much drama - if not more - in religious communities of all kinds.

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.

We had a world built entirely of people who were technical for the love of it. Those who were fascinated with computers and the internet before there was real money in it as a career. When no one cared about computers and left us alone the community built by a largely neurodiverse group had rational rules that made people that would fall into the inneagram 8 category feel comfortable. Not just neurodiverse either, despite the stereotype of the neckbeard with pocket protector women were better represented in the 70s and 80s computing community than later on. We may have surpassed that mark now though, I haven't compared numbers recently.

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.

> for a brief moment in the 90s and early 2000s we didn't have any of this dogma that could demand you nod along. You could be openly gay, openly Christian, conservative, leftist, or apolitical.

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.

An awful lot of people still don't have the luxury of being openly gay in the 2020s, because they happen to live in militant theocratic states. People on the activist left often seem to conveniently forget this, in a way that can only be fairly described as "naive at best or disingenuous at worst".

>An awful lot of people still don't have the luxury of being openly gay in the 2020s, because they happen to live in militant theocratic states.

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.

>So they need reverse psychology to express anger at injustice because of the Code of Conduct? What is this world we're building?

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.

I'm tempted to add a CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md to my main project repo with the following:

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.

Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure that adding something like that would make things worse and open the door to wasting your time on pointless issues like "Why are you using this code of conduct instead of $my_pet_code_of_conduct?", whereupon you tell them they're not working towards the project goal, which leads to even more drama. It's simply not worth it.

Those who can, do. Those who can't, open an issue about the code of conduct.

There is a writers’ Facebook group which states its moderation policy like this: “the group is moderated very lightly. We are not your parents; if you have a disagreement, work it out among yourselves.” I like this policy.

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.

CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md but it's just the Marine Core code of conduct.

Maybe the one he wept at helping to create.

So why not just say that. All this dog whistle talk is extremely immature and unprofessional.

Because this is what happens when you try to restrict not only speech, but how community members even express themselves for fear someone might be hurt or offended.

That's ridiculous. I hope the community fixes that.

Why would a “this is what happened and it’s the reason I’m not longer going to be involved in the Rust project going further” possibly be able to violate a Code of Conduct? Sure if you start calling people an asshole or lash out. But that’s similarly uncalled for…

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

You know, this pattern:

* 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 believe there is a wide range of possible emotional reactions between weeping about something on one end and sucking it up on the other.

I think he is saying that words such as "cruelty" and "betrayal" have a weight in them that are way out of proportion to the events that took place.

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.

Yes, that or "man up."

>Suck it up; man up.

In our paroxysm of righteous correctionism, we've lost track that that is really good advice, even though crudely phrased.

Pretty sure they’re just using poetic license.

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.

Are you really comparing this little spat to marital infidelity?

This further emphasizes OP's point—nothing the Rust team can do to you should approach the emotional impact of marital betrayal.

rust needs it's empaths, too. if we can all figure out how to adult, be decent, work together, and understand the strengths/weaknesses of our very different personalities and skills, hopefully we can all continue building cool stuff together without alienating important voices.

> if we can all figure out how to adult

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.

That depends on the power balance. Adults have power over children. The author does not have power over the people involved. Deescalating when you lack power is often little different from not saying anything at all. This is why most non-generational change to existing power structures involves large groups of very angry people. Same reason complaining about your Google Account getting locked on social media is more effective than spending the rest of your life going through their process.

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.

You don't have to have power to deescalate.

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.

>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.

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.

The author isn't a child to the core team's adult, they were one of four members of the core team [0]. They're not an individual contributor who feels incapable of effecting change in the wider org, they were mad at the way one of their peers handled the situation.

[0] Still listed as such here: https://www.rust-lang.org/governance/teams/core

No power over anyone is required. Reasonable and well-grounded arguments seeking to resolve conflict will do.

That requires either both sides to be equal in power or both sides to be willing to stick to the process. From the blog the author believes neither is the case.

Yes, agreed. My objection is to their dramatic language and seeming over-reaction. There were much better ways to express disagreement and protest.

The author was one of four members of the core team [0], "which is which is ultimately responsible for all decision-making in the project."[1] If there was a power imbalance it's because they were ineffective in their position.

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

[1] https://rust-lang.github.io/rfcs/1068-rust-governance.html

> if you have lived a very protected life.

You just summarised 98% of all current cultural problem in Silicon Valley.

To me it looks like both sides are acting very emotional over the situation and using very loaded language to push their agendas forward. I almost feel the author is using discomfort even more as a weapon than the person who originally complained.

Which appears to be one of the underlying cultural flaws in the community to begin with. "Everyone sucks here" is a common situation because bad behavior is often a product of bad project culture.

> you can only cry over this “betrayal”, “mistreatment” and “cruelty” if you have lived a very protected life.

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.”

If your workplace is regularly bringing you to tears, you should start looking for a new position. No one needs a job with that level of emotional overhead.

I wonder if that quote was tongue-in-cheek. It reminds me of the reviews of the Three Wolf Moon t-shirt on Amazon [0].

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Mountain-Three-Wolf-Short-Sleeve/dp/B...

> Much less weight should be given to someone "feeling uncomfortable"

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.

I thought "rust culture" came out of this sort of super SJW/woke culture of mozilla? Nothing against that sort of mindset in theory, but it sometimes leads to a certain irrational hypersensitive intolerant mob behavior and authoritarian/anti democratic tendencies.

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.

[1] https://github.com/blyxyas/no-rust-policy-change

All this is painfully predictable if you remotely pay attention to their initial public facing culture, statements, etc lol.

Also, lots of people high up in Rust have a background in JavaScript, where drama is common, which I believe has helped normalise it as a mode of social interaction.

Drama is common in human Comunnities.

Your Bayes is showing.

In high school.

Only in ones that are not based on merit and long term relationships.

Can you give an example of one that is?

Are there any communities that are really based on merit?

Pretty much every human community has to be to some extent, with the exception of communities that face no external competition. Non-meritorious communities subject to competition quickly disappear.

“…to some extent…” is, i think, the most important piece of your reply.

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.

What? Non-meritorious communities are known to last literal millennia.

Caltech's undergraduate community was, at least in the years I attended.

Just because someone doesn't deserve something based on merit, doesn't mean they won't be resentful and vindictive if they don't get it. You could even say the concept of merit and the reality of differentiation of competence and ability itself leads to drama and conflict.

The funny thing is the typical response to basic drama is aggressive moderation/oversight, which often generates as much or more drama than before.

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.

To misquote John Cleese - "This is exactly how Nazi Germany started"

Drama is actually the name of a town in Greece

Not sure there's a real connection between the languages at least when it comes to "drama". Especially considering JavaScript is the most used language, or at least in the top 5 at this rate due to how low the entry barrier is for serious use. So purely from numbers, there's bound to be a bunch with a background in JavaScript, as with any other new language. You could have also said the same thing about Python for the same reasons.

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.

Wow, no kidding:

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.

State your assumptions, prepare to be boarded -9front IRC banner.

Since micro aggressions are a thing number 2 is hardly possible.

That's not my understanding of micro-aggressions [1]. IIUC, inadvertently doing a micro-aggression isn't being an asshole, but persisting in it after it has been pointed out definitely is.

[1]: Disclosure: I'm a minority (disabled), but I'm also a white man.

The question is whether everything that is called a micro aggression is one.

Ever heard of the Law of Penetrance of Negative Residues?

Your assumptions about micro-aggressions existing are wrong. "Don't be an asshole" is (or should be) about how you act towards others not how others perceive your actions. If someone wants to be offended, that's them not being cool.

I feel offended by woke people.

I've been involved with Software Development for over 20 years started with VB6 and some perl/python in 1998. I saw the "informal code of conduct" and it never worked. What really happened: many people were treating terribly and most of it was swept under the rug. CoC were created for valid and good reasons. I'm not defending the Rust community here, it seems childish to me. The past is not what you are trying to claim it was in this post. Look up the MANY Rails conference sexual harassment issues and worse.

We should not whitewash the past because the present isn't what we want.

Full disclosure, I usually do not involve myself with large groups -- so my views are likely to be a bit more innocent/naive.

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?

I do think this is kind of naive. If you consider something like a sexual assault, or even the more severe forms of harassment, that tends to happen among people who know each other, and people often don't talk about it after being victimized. So you not knowing those stories out of your tight knit community doesn't mean much -- if those stories exist you might need to have the parties involved trust you a lot to confide it, or you might need to really probe people about it.

And now we have a CoC and people are still mistreated. smh.

You shouldn't need a giant, complex CoC to tell people engaging in sexual harassment and creepy behavior to leave. Which is usually the type of stuff people point to for why it's so important to spend thousands of hours debating the rules.

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.

more like "and now we have a CoC, so when anyone is even slightly grievanced, multiple careers will get torched (and not even always the party you'd expect)"

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.

I am an older geek. I never got the CoC against sexual harassments. It is f*cking illegal. Should be reported to the police and taken care of by the actual laws.

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.

If the police actually cared about sexual harassment, that might be a good idea. They've never shown any sign that they do.

Also, lots of behaviour can be pretty shitty without being illegal.

Sexual harrassment isn't necessarily illegal, it's so loosely defined.

If (2) was a core piece, then having worked on enough open source projects I can assure you that informal code of conduct didn't do shit. ;P

From this “Graydon's reply” you linked:

> 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.

Reminds me of The Tyranny of Structurelessness [0], even though there is a structure. My bet would be, no matter how smart you are, your ape genes have more to say than your brain. The rider (mind) and the elephant (emotions + brain stem)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessne...

I don’t get the relation between structure and emotions.

110%. Any organization that lacks transparency in decision-making and accountability (that is, attribution of decisions to specific people) devolves into a shadow-hierarchy.

Which is even worse than an explicit hierarchy, because it provides more gray area for people with power to do things anonymously.

Yeah I worry about this. There was no "C leadership", it was simple enough that dozens of people created their own compilers within a few years of C existing. this was back before the internet. they had companies sprouting up like Borland just making C compilers for personal home computers. C just ... spread. All these kids learning Arduino in school, they are learning C.

There basically is no other usable compiler than the official rust compiler. So it has this 'leadership' thing that ... C never really needed

Rust is winning market from C and C++ precisely because of strong technical leadership and direction. It couldn’t have made much progress by taking similar hands off approach as C, because C is already more than good enough C.

> Rust is winning market from C and C++ precisely because of strong technical leadership and direction.

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.

The hype around Julia definitely gives Rust a run for it's money.

"in Julia" yields 25 pages of results on HN, while "in Rust" has >100 pages alongside other popular langs.

What's your point? The target market of Julia is mostly scientific, not general purpose computing. That market is almost certain to have a smaller representation on HN. I'd actually contend that for a language with such a targeted to have 25 pages of results HN supports my point rather than debunks it.

Julia doesn't even operate in the same space as rust... Julia is closer to go lang than it is to rust and I wouldn't say those two languages are similar at all. Also if I were picking a language on community alone, I'd pick rust. The issues going on here are not reminiscent of the community at all. Julia also had drama over conferences and allowing members to speak...

So what? Nothing you have said has anything to whatsoever to do with hype.

> Rust is winning market from C and C++ precisely because of strong technical leadership and direction.

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.

In fairness, this reasoning would suggest that any new language developed 40 years younger than C and 30 years younger than C++, that incorporates advances in computer language design that C/C++ cannot adopt without breaking backwards compatibility would enjoy the same success, if not more, than Rust.

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.

Rust is winning marketshare because it was built ground-up to take advantage of the massive progression of Moore's Law at compile time. Compiling programs written in Rust would have been completely infeasible 20 years ago, it would have simply been too slow.

C++ doesn't compile that much faster than Rust.

Modern C++, I agree. C++98 is a lot faster to compile though, even the same code using the same standard library calls.

Having worked on a modestly sized C++98 codebase in the recent past, I don't think I agree. But of course it would need proper benchmarks.

These things can be true simultaneously. The Rust team can have extremely strong technical leadership and direction while also being incredibly immature when it comes to conflict resolution.

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.

Nope. Most languages have strong leadership and zero chance of taking anything from C/C++. And it will takes a very long time for Rust to get even 5% of the C/C++ market. There are more than 6 million C++ programmers out there. And new C++ projects are started every day.

Wouldn’t you consider the C standards committee as the leadership of C?

The C committee started after the various compiler implementations. Rust seems to have had the committee before the compiler.

Definitely not. C was born in a different context, and these days it's not common for any language to have multiple competing implementations, certainly not in its early years. C needed the standard because there were many implementations, JavaScript needed a standard because there were many implementations, but Python or C# or Rust or Java don't have a standard (although there are technical specifications of different degrees of rigor) because the standard is what the reference toolset does, modulo what are accepted as bugs by the technical team.

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.

There were plenty of different FORTRAN compilers back then too.

It just was a completely different era. There was no consept of what we today call open source, no compilers freely available over the internet, no internet to speak of for that matter, no cross-platform/multi-platform compilers to speak of, more platform diversity than now, FORTRAN was also a vastly smaller language so you could have implemented a compiler in a reasonable time if you didn't want to shell out $BIGBUCKS to buy one, optimizers (which are deep magic and really hard to write from scratch) weren't yet a thing, there were no standardization bodies that worked on programming languages, everything was vastly less connected than today. That obviously leads to redundant work.

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?

Note that the "C committee" was actually the X3J11 committee of ANSI, the American National Standards Institute. In other words, it was just one committee within an organization with a long history of developing cross-industry standards. As such, their job in theory wasn't to invent new technology, but rather to adjudicate between technologies proposed and demonstrated by competing industry vendors.

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)

> Nothing against that sort of mindset in theory, but it sometimes leads to a certain irrational hypersensitive intolerant mob behavior and authoritarian/anti democratic tendencies.

Really? Nothing against a thing that leads to hypersensitive intolerant mob behavior and authoritarian/anti democratic tendencies!?

They said "in theory", which is a contrast to "in practice".

Yes. Nothing against it in theory, but it leads to stuff they don't like. Did you read the whole comment?

I did. I don’t get why they wouldn’t be against the theory of something so obviously flawed that leads to exactly what they are describing.

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”.

Marxism works great, in theory.

well its a difficult terminology to use because the right/conservative people are of course also against sjw/woke ideology. The distinction is that I'm criticizing very specific tendencies of some people whom could be best described as woke, not the underlying ideology. Such as when they weaponize privilege, language, race or sexuality in order to achieve some secondary unrelated or overarching goal. It's "the ends justify all means" mentality, if by democratic process you won't achieve consensus that agrees with your personal particular set of beliefs, then the rejection, destruction and undermining of collective decision making processes is justified. Which ignores the original reasons for why democratic structures exist in the first place (such as term limits and adversarial structures vs. corruption and abuse of power). This is essentially my criticism of some woke people.

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.

> 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.

Perhaps you should re-evaluate these assumptions and actually listen to people before you dismiss them.

> I just hope it's already too big to fail at this point,

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.

“SJW/woke” as an epithet is a right wing trope. Can we not do this please?

It's also a relatively apt description of a small subset of left-wing groups. My assumption is that the parent comment is explicitly referring to this small subset.

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.

Not really, you see the same term used in left wing circles to refer to liberals/synthetic left types.

A decade ago - until the term was appropriated by the reactionary right as an insult!

> I thought "rust culture" came out of this sort of super SJW/woke culture of mozilla? Nothing against that sort of mindset in theory, but it sometimes leads to a certain irrational hypersensitive intolerant mob behavior and authoritarian/anti democratic tendencies.

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.

But the fact that he was black is a non-factor here, and shouldn't even be mentioned.

TFA seems to think it was important. The Rust conference needs to have a black friend to prove it isn't racist.

Why? Am I to believe the Rust leadership is so enlightened they're incapable of racial discrimination?

There's a reason people don't want to talk about racism, and it's not because it doesn't exist anymore...

I mean...it's not like Rust leadership didn't have a prominent member who loudly advocated ideas like "kill all men", right?

Once you understand that "woke" is basically a kind of white internecine competition then it stops being surprising that the "woke" movement doesn't really care about non-white persons except as pieces in that game. These events are of course entirely consistent with that interpretation, and so far I've never seen it falsified.

this whole "woke" mentality is going out of hand too fast...

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

Generally, these days "woke" is a word that regressive bullying assholes use to insult people.

It definitely strikes me as thought-terminating cliche. If people were calling themselves woke maybe, but I've only seen it as pejorative for several years.

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.

Except if you actually look as things it's usually the "woke" elements that best fit the definition of bullying.

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.

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.

This is modern wokespeak for "what you did is unprofessional and I'm not sticking around for more." A lot of the emotional hyperbole in this blog post is essentially that - emotional vulnerability and sensitivity is valued in "hyper-woke" contexts, while words like "unprofessional" are seen as callous - and I kind of read it that way rather than literally.

I still don't want to do them the favor of normalizing such dramatic language by accepting it. Just call it "unprofessional" if you truly feel that it was.

Unfortunately, you have to write for your audience. The audience for this piece seems to want emotional melodrama combined with diffusion of responsibility.

Let us see you rewrite it given the community culture and guidelines. Can't write i left because of toxic pieces of shit people with zero empathy.

Not sure how much the empathy levels of someone -- not an objective metric -- should be used when making professional calls about speakers in a foundation but you do you.

The underlying problem seems to be: sidestepping democratic processes. IMO that is what should be addressed first and foremost.

Here’s chatgpt:

—-

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.

That’s actually very good

"I decided to depart after recognizing the profound sense of disillusionment and dissatisfaction JeanHeyd experienced due to perceived unfair treatment and deception. The depth of this unfairness, reaching a level that I perceived as unjust, deeply resonated with me. This situation highlighted a need for better communication and understanding within the community, prompting my decision to step back. I express my deepest regret over these circumstances, and I sincerely hope for improvements in our conduct and interactions going forward."

-- another version by ChatGPT

If you're leaving the community anyway, does it matter if you violate the CoC through being honest about your opinions?

I think it’s more important to engage with the contents of the post rather than your misgivings with the author’s writing style. Honestly it’s a childish approach to have.

Be the change you want to see in the world.

Criticizing how the author (who just left Rust) engages with the community while he himself criticizes how engagement with the community is done is rather valuable.

Good to know you wouldn’t want to work with anyone autistic or on the spectrum.

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 bizarre that you're scolding this person for being intolerant while implying such language is to be expected of "anyone autistic or on the spectrum". To me, that is offensive stereotyping.

Was actually super surprised by that line. Was with the post until then.

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

This whole saga has been legitimate grievances clouded by lengthy blog posts that could have been so much shorter and less dramatically written. The other blog about this controversy clocked in at over 2000 words!

This whole exchange feels off. Essentially, the underlying spat is over a strong technical disagreement, but it is being prosecuted in this weirdly stylized language of emotion and abuse. I have no idea how something like this can be overcome so long as the core Rust community feels this is an acceptable way to handle things. Clearly this is something which extends beyond the immediate leadership team.

The problem is that the strong technical disagreement was not brought up the many times it could have! Instead the stick was stuck in the bike wheels way after the bike was moving forward at a decent speed.

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.

> that the strong technical disagreement was not brought up the many times it could have!

Consensus attained by a shouting match?

What I don't get here is the following. No matter how egalitarian you organize such a conference, doesn't it make sense that the organizers get the last say in what the keynote looks like? They have an rough overview over all contributions and they can decide if what you contribute is best suited to be a keynote.

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.

In this specific instance, there was a vote to have this keynote. Then somebody seems to have circumvented this process to get the keynote downgraded (leading to the OP resigning, as they had been behind the initial vote!)

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.

Okay that is a tad bit more problematic, but I still think it is not that dramatic of a thing, especially without hearing the reasoning of the organizers.

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.

> but I still think it is not that dramatic of a thing, especially without hearing the reasoning of the organizers.

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.

We've deprived a whole generation of the rhetorical tools for healthy, impersonal and professional argument. It's no wonder that they've pressed this "stylized language of emotion and abuse" into service to fill the void: it's all they know.

curious - what tools were deprived to a whole generation?

Shouting in the workplace and three martini lunches?

You're joking, but you're not wrong.

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.

It's true that people are less and less ok being confrontational. I don't mind having a spat, but it is becoming increasingly rarer

Critical thinking skills independently from the subjects they may arise from. It’s not a trendy topic of argument, but I will also propose that modern English speakers have no notion of their own language without a prerequisite in Latin, or you get folks like the person trying to tell me my subscription date started at some arbitrary date unrelated to the specific date I signed under.

> I will also propose that modern English speakers have no notion of their own language without a prerequisite in Latin.

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 previous generations didn’t exactly set a good example for healthy, impersonal and professional argument.

But still, they did create (and sometimes even use) tools that at least make it possible – tools which far too many members of the youngest generations, and their organisations, seem to have abandoned or never even knew they existed in the first place.

Skins are luxuriously thin these days, yeah.

Previous recent generations also had most nations sending large groups of their men off to kill other nations' men for insufficient reasons.

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...

War and nationalism haven’t ceased, nor have the emotional levers you speak of gone away, what has happened is that folks are comfortable behaving differently online than they would face to face

> I have no idea how something like this can be overcome so long as the core Rust community feels this is an acceptable way to handle things. Clearly this is something which extends beyond the immediate leadership team.

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).

Look at the leadership. They have a large number of non-technical people and placeholders. The reason why it has ended up becoming political is because Rust is run by politicians.

Pray tell, who do you think are non-technical people in https://www.rust-lang.org/governance

Everyone here knows exactly who I am talking about. That isn't who the leadership is (as you well know).

I honestly have no clue who you are talking about.

Leaving (or excluding yourself from) something because of "personal reasons" is very different to excluding someone else because of your own discomfort, though.

Yeah seriously. Still putting my eyes back into their sockets after they rolled out from reading that

>Much less weight should be given to someone "feeling uncomfortable"

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.

Yeah, this language is just such hyperbole. Cruelty is pulling someones finger nails out with vice grips. What Rust did is rude, not cruel.

It is absolutely having an impact on the outside. I'm currently putting together the architecture of our new Content Delivery platform, and considering different parts of the stack. The look from the outside is of a project who recently has been making very bad decisions from leadership - it makes me consider what to get our team to upskill in, or to hire on, as we move away from "everything in JS".

A Go stack is looking quite achievable.

> Much less weight should be given to someone "feeling uncomfortable"

Ironic https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2021-March/235124.html

I don't get what's wrong with his post about reflection, why would someone be uncomfortable with a tool?

https://soasis.org/posts/a-mirror-for-rust-a-plan-for-generi... - Is this the post ?

Right. I didn't realize it was that sort of reflection, see my edit.

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.

I don't get it at all. Why would this would be inappropriate to cover in a keynote. Whether or not it ends up in the language, it's interesting material. It seems like it may be a case of people taking themselves too seriously; "we can't have that topic in our precious keynote!". Nobody cares!

I think it would be totally reasonable for a core member to say something like, "I'm uncomfortable with a keynote about this compile time reflection from Person1. I think it could look like we're endorsing it more than we are prepared for." That's exactly how I might think and talk about some extensive complex proposal from some outsider for a problem that I have some ideas on how we might want to solve. All the people upset about the keynote changes describe it in such like exaggerated form, that to me it's hard to just believe that they are the reasonable ones here.

> The Rust project needs to stamp this out before it begins to fester.

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.

From Rust team discussion at Reddit, it's not that anyone sprints away, the answer is that no one has the time to balance volunteering for Rust, working on code, reviewing, doing technical review, and then on top of that moderation and doing diplomatic stuff.

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.

Perhaps, I've not followed closely but I know the subreddit is heavily moderated from overflow in to other media occasionally.

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 :)

An important distinction on their moderation style:

---

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...

That's probably the worst way possible to handle it, worse than just leaving people to have their petty disagreements in the thread.

Why? If it's petty it is by definition unimportant, so it can only cause damage by scaring people away or reinforcing an idea of a toxic community.

...vs idea of uncaring mods that don't want to do the job they signed for so they will just stifle conversation on topics that get too hot ?

Those threads don't happen everyday either

The other response, from kibwen acting with the moderator badging enabled, is more nuanced:

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."

> only person that likes doing that stuff... leads to episodes like this

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

Who is that person?

They need to stamp out reflection before it starts to fester. Not a surprise that’s a controversial subject.

> They're asked to speak at RustConf after a leadership vote.

> 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.

Yes you're right, thank you :)

Compile-time reflection is great in principle. It gets us quite close to the aim of compile-time dependent types, which would be a great feature for Rust and bring it close to parity with newer languages such as Zig, as well as lay the groundwork for further important developments such as proof-carrying code. It would be quite important to know why this Rust team member felt "uncomfortable" with the technical contents of this talk which were clearly described by the author as highly speculative, and thus inherently open to discussion.

>Rust members were "uncomfortable" with this purely technical viewpoint - not their behavior, personal beliefs, or even their demographic?

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?

> 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.

Not sarcasm I think you just didn’t understand; they are not asking for reasons why it would be bad for this behavior to spread, but rather asking what’s stopping it? And it sounds like a rhetorical question as posed

This is like a modern day version of "they're a witch!", with the towns people rallying behind to burn them at the stake.

The corresponding magic phrase in liberal US school systems has become “equity issue.” I’m a pretty progressive guy but the number of times I’ve seen people “win” debates by declaring that their opponent’s ideas cause an “equity issue” with absolutely no rationale is unreal. And it can be applied no matter what position you’d like to support. Online work is an equity issue because poor kids don’t have computers. Giving all kids free laptops is an equity issue because poor kids don’t have professional parents who know how to help them use them. You can’t win.

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.

True, human behavior is actually nearly identical, then and now. Superstition, religion etc. have new avatars that may bear little resemblance to their ancestors, but they are all well and alive in their new forms.

It's also great because there's no way for you to dispute my claims of feeling uncomfortable / "unsafe", since these (alleged) feelings occur in my own head. No one can dispute my feelings. And if you're foolish enough to allow my (claimed) feelings to govern your behaviour I now have arbitrary control over you. Neat huh?

Except that is BS because these are purely technical positions being reacted towards, not anything about human relationships or power dynamics

Looks like the Rust community could use some reflection ;)

Perhaps the people feeling most uncomfortable about reflection are those who need it most.

Notable that this was published on Friday evening/Saturday morning. The Rust project/leadership committee/RustConf folks need to coordinate, come to a consensus, make some painful decisions and communicate that with a united voice. That’s not going to happen on a weekend because some folks might not be available.

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.

Come on, Rust committee. Let's grow up here, shall we

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!

You are generalizing. This is a very isolated incident, and one that I as a Rust dev am baffled about. It seems poorly handled by all sides involved.

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.

You are generalizing

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.

I'm skeptical. This incident in particular doesn't prove that Rust has more 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.

This incident in particular doesn't prove that Rust has more zealots.

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".

Pretty certain any widespread dev language has communities…

> Rust has more zealots, than every other language combined.

> 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.

Had I wanted to say rust was only filled with zealots, I would have said so, instead of differentiating advocate from zealot.

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.

Yeah, it's an isolated incident just like all the other isolated incidents in Rust. Anyone remember the Rust Foundation trademark oopsie literally a month ago where the RF wanted to control in fine detail the usage of the name and logo?

Well I for one had no clue about it. Shows you how interesting the average dev feels such things are.

Yeah, unless they happen to be in the Rust community, or be Rust users or selling services related to Rust, etc. etc.

Not sure what you're saying, truthfully. Could you please clarify?

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.

> And then they pushed them out of the conference behind leadership's back?

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.

Rust leadership have a lot to reflect on.

I see similar behaviors in multiple online "tech savvy" communities. I tend to minimize the behavior to "they don't know how to handle an online community and behave in a very childish way". It seems we need to recap what OSS communities have learnt from decades.

I'm reminded of Sayre's Law [1]:

> 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.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law

natural extension of the woke/SJW nonsense. it will ultimately be the downfall of all OOS as people refuse to contribute/engage.

>> 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?

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.

It seems like the problem here is not even power of one group, but an individual doing an end run around the group.

>> It seems like the problem here is not even power of one group, but an individual doing an end run around the group.

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.

Keep in mind that this whole thing started only about 36 hours ago. The internet conditions us to expect immediacy but this is all being done by volunteers on a holiday weekend, not a corporate PR department. I doubt the full teams involved will even be able to convene until Tuesday at least due to people on vacation.

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.

>> Keep in mind that this whole thing started only about 36 hours ago.

Fair enough.

How the situation is handled matters, so I suppose we will see.

This person claims to be one of the individuals. https://pony.social/@sgrif@hachyderm.io/110447363468527189

> And then they pushed them out of the conference behind leadership's back?

My understanding is that they (unilaterally) changed the talk's status from "keynote" to "regular talk", so they didn't quite push them out.

While the language itself looks fine, I find the community a bit off-putting.

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.

> While the language itself looks fine, I find the community a bit off-putting

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?

> 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?

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.

Unwinding is optional, and not available on all platforms that Rust supports (including WebAssembly). The language made the right choice here IMO. Lack of faillible allocation in the stdlib is a major issue, but it's also fixable.

Other replies have made excellent points but I'd also like to point out that in the world of Rust the only time you want your code to panic is when something irrecoverable (at a very low level) happens. Like if you're messing around with bare metal/embedded stuff and you just set a (hardware) register but for whatever reason that call failed so now you can be guaranteed that the rest of your code just can't work. It's panic time!

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).

Actually relying on panics for unwinding in any way is not encouraged in any way, and compiling with `panic = 'abort'` is really common, and completely removes all stack unwinding support.

As someone learning the language on production code I must agree that the error handling of Rust is terrible. Exceptions have never been a struggle point for me with other languages, but Rust error handling has literally given me headaches.

From the very beginning Rust was a political movement first, and a programming lang second.

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

And of course now that the people who wrote the CoC aren’t even following it we know that was really just a political tool

Everyone knows those are a childish tool used by bully nerds to wield power over others with this fake better than thou outlook on things that have nothing to do with programming or the computer.

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.

No, no. Groups that have endless infighting/debates are the ones that evolve, stick around, and gain support. It's the groups that are cock-sure about everything with everyone falling in line behind the leadership that end up stagnating and ultimately end up being replaced with something better (often with bitter or explosive endings).

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.

Python removing "bad" old ideas caused it to stagnate on 2.7 for a decade and probably did irreversible harm to the ecosystem as people left for languages that didn't have a nasty split in the community.

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)

No mention of the fact that you cherry picked virtual machine languages, dynamic interpreted languages that don’t even exist without a garbage collector, a system memory allocator, and more, all written in C,C++, or Rust?

Rust was a political movement first? Can you elaborate?

In many ways it is a "you had to be there" type of thing...

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.

It's a shame that people are so thin-skinned they can't handle a difference of opinion on architecture. All I can say is wow. I feel they really need to use this as a moment of reflection. Is democracy dead? No committee will ever work if there has to be unanimous decisions on everything, unless you are living in an echo chamber.

Bad play Rust

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.

Never understood the childish fighting between languages, libraries within a language or as here different viewpoints.

I mean, it's good to discuss different viewpoints, but programming choices is a hill I would never want to die on.

> And then they pushed them out of the conference behind leadership's back?

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?

Some important context that's missing from your summary (and something I wasn't aware of until I dug into it more) is that the author was a member of Rust's core team [0] and the interim leadership group responsible for designing Rust's new governance structure [1]. They were the one who posted the new RFC on project governance [2].

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...

[2] https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/3392

>Rust members were "uncomfortable" with this purely technical viewpoint - not their behavior, personal beliefs, or even their demographic?

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.

I may misunderstand something here, but I'd assume the organizers of a conference are in charge of deciding which talk goes where. Why is there an expectation for this to be different here?

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 is not the next C++. C++ is the next C++, rust is something else.

I feel like I’ve observed similar “childish” behavior from the Go community more so, and to some degree in even the C# community where people were upset at Microsoft’s probably-malicious decisions (like removing Blazor debugging from non-Windows environments). Some of their proposed and implemented C# changes in the last couple of years seem really asinine too, not just to me but hundreds+ who voice their disappointment on Github.

This is a very egotistical industry and this is one of many ways that manifests.

>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.

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."

> They've also written an article about reflection in Rust - a purely technical thing that is already pretty widely disliked conceptually.

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.

C++ templates are not reflection; either compile time or runtime. There is a form of reflection, but that's RTTI, which is a totally different ballgame.

True, but both come under the heading of adding a level of indirection at compile time. It's a tough language decision on how far to go in that direction. Go, pre-template, was minimalist on this. C++ probably went too far. Where to stop is a good question.

The would-have-been speaker's blog post addresses this question specifically. He apparently pushed back many times on the idea of giving the keynote on his work and was assured that the Rust organization was aware of the topic and wanted him to go ahead [0]. Then they walked back on that.

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

> Rust members were "uncomfortable" with this purely technical viewpoint

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.

From your link:

> 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?

I haven't seen anyone bring this up, so I will.

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

FWIW, JeanHeyd did mention the issue themselves as well after a while[1].

[1] https://twitter.com/__phantomderp/status/1662511693136637952

Only to say

> I haven't even considered this angle until this [other] person's tweet.

I agree with your statement as a whole but have a small nitpick (on your small nitpick)

> 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.

Yup. The actual meaning of a composite symbol cannot in general be guessed from its constituent elements.

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.

Not to mention the fact that construction can be messy for other reasons. I present a bit from George Carlin's routine on airline announcements:

"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!"

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_word_for_%22crisis%22

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

"somewhat" is a strange word to use in this context and probably warrants more explanation. Are you perhaps a child immigrant, and so you have a few early years of exposure in an environment with Cantonese everywhere and then moved somewhere else?

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.

Ah yes. It's strange but I can explain.

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.

Thanks for explaining what you meant by "somewhat". One of the people whose opinion about JFK's quote gets a lot of play is Victor Mair, Victor thinks it'd be better to focus on teaching Pinyin rather than get Chinese kids to invest so heavily in the Han writing system which makes alphabetic systems look trivial - and if you're willing I'd be interested in what you think of that as somebody who learned the Latin alphabetic writing system (for English) first, but was heavily exposed to spoken Cantonese much before that.

Learning the Han characters is difficult, and for a foreigner learning the language, if you mostly want to communicate verbally it's quite obvious which the easy path is.

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.

Agreed - see Etymological Fallacy. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymological_fallacy>

> ‘person of color’ doesn’t include white people

In most contexts, it doesn’t include Asian people either.

I think moreso than specifically meaning JeanHeyd was target as such due to race, the implication was rather that since JeanHeyd had previously raised that the lack of diveristy in speakers at the conf. was an issue, some members voting on this may have held onto that.

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.

There are a few reasons that people prefer the term nonwhite over POC in certain contexts, and I think most people using it are using it intentionally because of them. The main issue is that the latter term is homogenizing:

> 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

> The main issue is that the latter term is homogenizing:

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.

Yes! You get it. The difference is that “white” is constructed as an in-group identifier, that has been adapted as needed to include previously non-white groups such as Jews and Italians.

I'd look towards stratified sampling to think more formally around the issue.

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...

I fail to see how non white doesn't also reduce the strata to 2, however. Where is the third stratum?

Moreover, who is white or non-white is political: currently a certain blood quantum is necessary for being American Indian; yet, in recent history under the one drop rule, for African Americans it was the inverse. The difference is material, as former was entitled to a say in land on a reservation, while the latter did not.

I'm pretty sure "person of colour" means literally the same thing as "non white" in the US, I find it hard to care about such minor differences in phrasing.

It’s annoying but important for those of us grappling with the long term effects of slavery and segregation and continued anti-blackness.

Yeah I'd tend to agree with the issues it being a homogenizing term as a whole (ie. often used awkwardly), however in this context where we're using it in order to refer to homogenization (that being, those who have had historically less power in white/male dominated industry), it seems a little softer of a homogenizing term as compared to 'non-white'.

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.

PoC feeling like language from an era long past when

An 'era long passed' perhaps? Can't quite figure that one out. I think I was looking for the term 'bygone era' but couldn't think of it.

I'm generally not a fan of the way people go about D&I, but the fact JeanHeyd has brought up the problem before makes it more pertinent.

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.

"White" is rather emphatically not like other ethnic or racial labels. Throughout the history of the US, who counts as "white" has been redefined many times to suit the political goals of the people at the time. In the era of the founding fathers, the Irish, Spaniards, Italians, all considered not white. Then during various times, often driving by waves of immigration of some other ethnicity people were freaking out about, drive a process to include them in whiteness as allies against the new threat.

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.

> Throughout the history of the US

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.”

Of course not, but the context is a conference in the US.

And you got it wrong. The Irish were not considered non-white. The ethnic divisions were (and are) most definitely not just White vs PoC. It used to be extremely important whether a person was a Catholic or a Protestant, for example, all other kinds of Christianity being conveniently ignored.

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.

> The Irish were not considered non-white.

They absolutely were and you can find writing by Ben Franklin in their own words saying so explicitly.

...Calling a PoC ignorant, lecturing them and imploring them to read about racism... whew...

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 assumed nothing about the person and am simply relating history.

You're relating ideological narrative that fits your political beliefs.

Not sure what that has to do with how, in today's US society, the 'White' vs 'PoC' labels and paradigm is used by an extremely divisive and toxic 'Us vs Them' mentality. Even when completely off-topic. Which the parent was making an obvious allusion to. The fact that you even dared to threaten him with gross insinuations says a lot about you, or more broadly about the US in general.

I'm not from anywhere close to the US cultural sphere.

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.

It's not the world I want either but denying this is what exists in reality in some false appeal to "can't we just ignore race" is equivalent to saying to people who are currently discriminated against "suffer in silence."

You do what you want but I'm not going to do that.

I agreed with you up until you casually insinuated ChillBill is racist.

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?

I think your comment shows a level of ignorance on the matter that's not warranted. This is exactly what I'm talking about. You seem to genuinely care but you have not done enough work to understand the intricacies of the topic. It's a difficult one, and you don't have to if you don't want to, but to lecture me on my phrasing shows a deep level of ideological holding that you may have, I would advise you to listen/read more, and always steelman your arguments.

They actually speak to this somewhat (rting + acknowledging someone else's commentary on the issue mentioning the same) on Twitter. If you view their tweet history and linked tweet, you'll see that they speak a bit to the sorry state of representation at these conferences in general

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

It was a small part of the post and I think it was explained fairly. It's part of the context, and they don't think it should be ignored. JeanHeyd doesn't have to have mentioned it (or even thought about it) for it to be considered relevant by someone else.

The behaviour is disrespectful regardless of colour, yes. But someone's skin colour does influence other people's behaviour.

Can we not? That point you're picking on was one sentence in the post ("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.")

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.

> "a person of color" (as if white is not a color, but whatever)

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.

"Colored" is now considered offensive by most, so why isn't "person of color" also viewed the same way? Both terms describe the same opressive system of nonsense racial hierarchy, after all.

This strange dichotomy caught-out Benedict Cumberbatch some years back https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/jan/26/benedict-cum...

I don't have a great answer to this other than "language evolves". Your comment could also be extended to other terms that have gone out of favor, such as "Negro" being replaced by "African American" and more recently "Black". I'm not a linguist nor a historian so I can't comment extensively on the "why" of this evolution.

It's complex but the reductionist explanation is that it is in part due to the euphemism treadmill, and in part etymological origin. "Colored" comes from the era of segregation, while "people of color" comes after.

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...

> But afaik, no one has proffered an adequate word to describe "folks that have too much melanin to be considered white".

Such a word is not necessary or desirable, because the categorization system it supports is not meaningful or useful.

Of course it's necessary and desirable. The "categorization system" in question already exists, whether it ought to or not. Bipoc have a more difficult socioeconomic situation, because of their skin color. Should "LGBTQ+" as a category not exist, because they are people just like straight people?

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"

All of these people are "bipoc", supposedly:

- 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.

It is transient and fleeting, and it has little to do with melanin. People of Jewish descent, Italians, and even the Irish, used to be considered non-white at various points in the last 100 years in the USA. People whose skin is almost white can still be considered black if, say, one of their grandparents was black. But people whose skin is dark at the end of the summer are nevertheless white as long as it turns pale during winter.

“Person of color” can be found in legal documents going back to the early 1800’s. There’s no “evolution” here. It’s all for political purposes. “Colored people” became “black ”became “African Americans” became “Black” (capital B). “People of color” is more broad and used to form a progressive coalition against “whiteness”, or rather the Western European tradition. In fact you could argue PoC doesn’t include Blacks as BIPOC is the fresh term to convince non-white people and so-called “white allies” to organize together so as to obtain power against the white oppressors.

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.

I love Rust but the ideological posturing and swathes of people who in their hearts are grifters is truly disappointing.

Framing a technical presentation you disagree with as "making you uncomfortable" in highly manipulative fashion definitely deserves to be called out in public.

ideology (culture!) is important.

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?

> 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”.

but how do we know who was it?

According to the discussion in /r/rust/, one person falsely claimed that they were speaking on behalf of Rust team consensus and the RustConf representative they talked to got burned by taking their word for it rather than asking for confirmation.

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.

Indeed it should not be surprising that the community (leadership) who from the outside seems among the most concerned with codes of conduct, inclusion and so on, is actually not so virtuous at all.

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.

Everyone has similar character flaws, but insecurities and cognitive dissonance make some need to virtue signal because they fear the crowd will think they are intolerant and their brain can't deal with the fact they might have some lizard brain thoughts from time to time. To deal with this they go to the extent of branding themselves "good person walking here", uh, sorry: "allies".

What if there are people who need laws, rules, processes to keep something at bay because they are actually suffering from addiction to the very thing they need to regulate.

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.

Yes, the "impose my beliefs on everyone" crowd.

Except people who involve themselves in dev communities aren't babies, and this parental impulse of protecting people from ideas YOU think are bad is completely toxic and self defeating.

Being afraid of disagreement is a cancer in our discourse.

I agree. I was suggesting something even worse: they have internal disagreement and guilt and are regulating others based on that. Any discourse makes them feel worse about it, so they regulate that too.

I haven't seen grifters in the community. But there definitely are narcissists and other ucky personality types. This is true of ALL communities... As soon as a niche group offers a position of power/importance the turds will line up to battle over it.

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.

I couldn't agree more. This is pure manipulation.

this is well in line with the woke culture, everything is about feelings, and not rational arguments. They need trigger warnings, and if things hurt some feefee's, its simply unacceptable regardless of factual matters.

that is why it is so disruptive in a professional setting, and kills all real honest cooperation

This is an absurd post, these tirades against the boogeyman of “woke culture” are so tiresome. Engage with the content of the blog post instead of deferring to this tribal bullshit.

That _is_ the content of the post. It’s not like people are arguing about grammar or the webpage style. People are talking about the words the author used and the ideas the author communicated.

Just completely pulling your agenda out of your ass on HN, huh?

I think the framing of 'uncomfortable' is just a poor choice of words among a bunch of people it would seem have difficulty with these things. My gosh this is all out of proportion.

I really love Rust, and I'm very encouraged to see this "ideological posturing" happening in public.

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.

Who was being exclusive, exactly? And how?

Don't think of it as an active act of creating exclusion, but of a state that just happened. Doesn't matter how, it could be completely natural, unintentional, and just how growth happened.

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?

OK, but what can be done then to avoid this "poor appearance" exactly? The black speaker pulled out. It's their decision to make. What can be done?

Continue on with the conference, learn from the current situation, and try again in the future.

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.

> It's a programming language, it's not meant to solve social problems, after all.

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.

But wouldn't the best way to appeal to a wider audience be to avoid the controversy and focus on the technical? We know how off-putting the drama can be, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36104163

I've attended a few Rust conferences and events, and they have all been unusually politicized. There has been a very strong emphasis on how inclusive the community is, which raises some red flags. It is akin to someone repeatedly expressing how smart or funny they are... it makes you wonder why. I was waiting for something like this to happen.

I agree. I've been scolded before by saying how unwelcoming the "Rust community" can be, and everyone comes out of the woodwork to say how inclusive it is. They're not the same thing. All of this is childish drama, around a _programming language_. Strange...

Is it a case of people repeatedly talking about grand principles that you never felt were actually naturally followed ?

It seems to be a recurring problem with Rust (the ecosystem, not the language). One of the nice things about the Kotlin and Java communities is that they lack this kind of endless drama. Technical events stay technical.

I agree with this 100%. As soon as you bring in outside topics, this kind of thing is inevitable. Rust should be about Rust. Whatever your personal beliefs are about BLM, abortion, the existence of aliens, whatever - putting any energy into external topics detracts from what should be the primary focus.

The Rust™ community is only welcoming and inclusive to those that completely agree with everything their monoculture believes. Any deviation will paint you as a heretic worthy of being condemned or burned at the stake like a witch.

I've been to plenty of conferences over the years, and I never really knew who was a "keynote speaker" or "only" a "speaker". Does anyone pay attention to this?

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.

I'd love to hear from someone who could outline the distinction between the two.

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.

It's possible, but those weren't mentioned unless I missed something. The keynote was "start of the day, shared slot with somebody else, 30 minutes".[1] No mention of different length after the change, but I would assume it will mean a different timeslot.

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

> just the regular chaos, hub-hub, and disagreements that's involved with organising these things

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.

Headliner Vs support band

It depends from conference to conference, but generally speaking "keynote" means:

  - 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.

You've been to more than me then so what am I talking about, but I always understood it to be the one talk given to kick things off or maybe conclude, i.e. nothing else is going on at the same time, 'everyone' is listening (or else skipping it).

Maybe it's just been watered down to 'featured'/'sponsored'/'recommended' talk? I haven't been aware of that.

It depends on the conference; sometimes it's something like "creator of the language shares their vision for the next five years", other times it's "talk from the most famous person we could book", and sometimes just "the talk we liked best from a relatively unknown person". If there are multiple tracks then sometimes the keynote will be the only talk for the timeslot, other times it's not.

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 haven't been to a conference in years because of COVID, but I've been to plenty mainly web and Python related before.

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.

It is funny because at least for me personally, it is the other way around.

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 ...

In that sense I loved the Ruby conferences where the keynote was commonly matz or tenderlove talking about some crazy deep problem ruby was tackling about memory, jit, or speed tradeoffs.

Sadly haven't been to one in years since they haven't come back to SG

I'm not saying the process was brilliant, but there's a difference between "the organizers were chaotic, didn't have their shit together, and need to do better" and "the organizers intentionally acted cruelly in an act of racist vindictiveness out of sheer malice".

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

> “the organizers intentionally acted cruelly in an act of racist vindictiveness out of sheer malice“

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.

The sentence "Systems have memory and biases. If the people that make up the system don't work to fight against these, they are perpetuated" in particular came off as more than merely "missed opportunity", although "racism" is probably too strong of a word too, but I don't know of anything else that fits better.

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.

Yep I think we see it pretty similarly regarding the first paragraph.

Re the vindictive part: I read it as someone having a personal issue with JeanHeyd and downgrading him as punishment.

Usually a keynote speaker is invited, and gets his travel and hotel costs reimbursed. Without reimbursement you usually think twice if you visit a conference or not. And I never heard of downgrading a speaker before, even if I heard of plenty of conference drama before.

I haven't and I've followed various academic fields for 10 yrs or so.

I feel like this post misses the point.

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.

Nobody cares but the speaker themselves.

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.

If nobody cared then why did someone make such a big deal out of the talk making them uncomfortable and therefore needing to downgrade it. It obviously did matter to more than just the speaker.

> Nobody cares but the speaker themselves.

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.

Yes, we care that people behave themselves, we're referring to 'who cares' about whether the nature of a talk being 'keynote speaker or not'.

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.

Its a CV brag. It means you're a big shot if you're giving the keynote at a top conference. Most people never do that so it's a big deal.

It grants high credibility in the outside world which gets you invited to additional opportunities.

You get an invite to a conference as a keynote speaker, which is then rescinded, for no good reason even? That's a big deal. I don't know about "heartless" and all that emotional stuff, it's just plain disrespectful.

You make up your mind about that kind of stuff BEFORE the invitation.

In academia, yes. To some people these details are important and matter. They have professional and sometimes even personal impacts.

The people who don't think this is a big deal are either lacking some empathy or don't understand how conferences work. The equivalent situation is something like being warmly invited to a wedding, which you accept. The bride and groom then spend time gushing over how great it is that you'll be there, telling everyone they know, insisting that you book tickets right away. Later, you're told you can only come to the ceremony and not the reception or party.

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.

It's up to you how you deal with stuff like this: you either turn everything in to a big drama or you just accept that these things are a part of life and can happen because the universe is a chaotic place. It's not like they lost their job or something; it's just a 2-day event.

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.

> We can also turn that around: the organisers are essentially being called a bunch of cruel racist assholes here, all without any real evidence.

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.

Just being "up close" doesn't mean your perspective is objective truth, or even reasonable. If anything, quite the opposite. The author of this post seems emotionally invested and may very well be ascribing motives to people that simply don't exist, and/or may have a coloured view of events.

It's a very clearly disgruntled senior member of the community who has just ragequit, following which they wrote a lament about their broken heart and their copious weeping over the intolerable cruelty of a withdrawn keynote invitation. It might be worth asking for a bit of evidence of their claims, given their penchant for melodramatic overstatement.

Perfect summary of what happened here. There's a million stories like this out there. Not sure why I should care about this one.

Seems a very immature way of dealing with things. Recent phenomenon or am I just becoming callous in my old age?

> It's a very clearly disgruntled senior member of the community who has just ragequit

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.

Well other languages are just programing languages, they are not virtuous like Rust. And I am not just overstating it. In so many contexts Rust people come swinging at whoever not using or competing with Rust, are not just making bad technical choice (still debatable) but morally lacking.

Can we avoid using a gun analogy here?

Nobody involved has died.

It’s just an expansion of the “smoking gun” idiom.

On an object level it's not a big deal, but you're not thinking about it with the correct framing.

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.

I mean, they haven’t re-invited him to the event have they? Kind of hard to see how it could be anything like a mistake.

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.

> It's not like they lost their job or something; it's just a 2-day event.

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.

This goes both ways though? The organizers also turned this into a big drama and could have instead chosen to just chill and accept there was going to be a keynote some of them didn't love.

> The equivalent situation is something like being warmly invited to a wedding > ... > Later, you're told you can only come to the ceremony and not the reception or party For context, I've spoken at over 100 conference events.

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.

> So it's an ego thing?

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.

People often get time off of work or school to be honored with formal talking gigs. IE your boss will let you off the hook to prepare for it because it makes your company/school look good. It'd be pretty embarrassing to have to explain to your boss or your PI that "oops I'm no longer a key note speaker"

Why not just make all talks keynotes then. Change the label and everyone gets respect.

Man, you really don't understand social dynamics do you?

Status, credibility and respect are real and tend to matter a lot.

It's not "an ego thing".

I understand social dynamics, I just don't respect them.

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.

> Is it though?

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.

Giving a keynote is being honoured by the event organisers. You've been specifically invited to talk. You're the headliner of the event. It may not matter to you as a listener, but I expect it would matter to you if you were asked to give such a talk.

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.

A regular slap in the face is not doing you any physical harm. If anything, it may even improve your blood circulation. So, if you saw someone slapped in the face, would you be confused "why this would spark such strong reactions"?..

I did that would have to depend on what the strong reactions were in that case. There are reactions to someone getting slapped in the face that I would consider to be overreactions.

This reasoning makes no sense. If keynote and a regular talk are not meaningfully different why did Rust leadership switch it?

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.

At the very least I would expect a keynote to be more inspiring, interesting, groundbreaking and possibly a little less technical/routine. It would be a different speech with a different preparation. So there is that. Plus bragging rights on CV and what people think of you and how many people turn up, how big the hall is etc. I think I would be annoyed to be downgraded.

It's funny, I have this same "who cares?" prior about it being a keynote, but draw the opposite conclusion. A simple disclaimer that the idea's appearance in a keynote doesn't imply that it will land in the language would have sufficed. It's just a talk, it's fine.

I suspect it's a big deal to people who speak at conferences, and not a big deal to people who don't. Court intrigue, essentially.

This is certainly strangely phrased. The version I got from another member was that the content of the talk was to be about a proposed feature that may not actually end up in Rust (in my view it likely would not), and having that be the keynote talk would imply to a lot of people that it would end up in Rust and put the language in an uncomfortable position where something other than the feature's merit would be pushing for its inclusion. Moving the talk away from being a centerpiece, in such a case, makes sense, and I have no idea whether this counts as poorly handled or not but saying it shouldn't have happened at all seems a bit naïve to me.

I would love if every language conference included a segment dedicated to “language ideas” where the expectation is that these ideas are unlikely to land but are fruitful to explore.

There are two completely orthogonal questions here:

- 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.

That may be completely true and a justifiable reason to change the decision, but it also is largely irrelevant. Preferably such concerns should have been raised prior to the vote. If they were and the vote was still to issue the invitation then that should have been the end of it. If it wasn't raised prior to the vote such concerns should have been brought back to the voting body and a re-vote taken. The decision of that vote should have them been the final word. Instead the decision of the voting body was subverted. That is the main issue.

> and having that be the keynote talk would imply to a lot of people that it would end up in Rust and put the language in an uncomfortable position

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.

If you had taken 2 seconds to look up the history of this, you would find that the person who was going to give the keynote already brought up these concerns with rust leadership and was cleared to talk on the topic anyways.

> something other than the feature's merit would be pushing for its inclusion

What do you mean?

Agree. They should’ve allowed for more discussion before sending invitations and more effort should've been made to come to a mutually beneficial solution. But going from an invited keynote (great honor) to an invited talk (honor) is not what I would call a deliberate attempt to "disgrace one of the experts in my field." It’s a single track conference where the speaker would be heard by all attendees and could’ve championed his ideas to the larger Rust community.

How petty are you as a person if you disregard your peers and screw someone over just because you're "uncomfortable" with a technical article?

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?

Also you are allowed to call that out AT THE CONFERENCE. In my field conference talks always have a Q and A. Sometimes people get completely shredded (in a tactful professional way) during a Q and A. If it's something you disagree with ask questions. This is someone willing to put their reputation on the line to say something, they've been vetted, voted on, made arrangements, etc. If they are wrong well that's what peer review is for, and working as a team is for.

Also how can someone be « uncomfortable » about a technical article? You can disagree, you can dislike it, you can even think it’s stupid, but uncomfortable? Wtf

Once on a conference one guy gave a talk about how he overrode python's module loading to load them from a mongodb instance. The reason was, if I remember correclty, because "it was easier for the juniors".

It made me veeeeeeeeery uncomfortable. Still a very good talk.

All of this drama / culture war or whatever you want to call it is a big part of what turned me off to Rust in the first place.

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.

What's a LARP?

https://lmgt.org/?q=LARP

cool site! thanks.

In this context, it's a figure of speech, meaning a game of pretending.

Literally, it means https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_action_role-playing_game

thanks

Live Action Role Play.

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.

thank you. i'll stick to hiking with our dog!

Well, Microsoft itself is using Rust now, in the Windows kernel no less. If they reverse that decision, then we have cause for concern. Otherwise, I'm sure this will all blow over.

I mean the .NET community/org is no stranger to drama and controversal moves by some team members which gets discussed over several weeks on HN, blocks, Twitter and elsewhere. For example, I vividly remember this:

https://exceptionnotfound.net/the-catch-block-80-the-dotnet-...

Is it just me, or is this a lot of melodrama for a language. I love arguing over technical details, this seems more like "house wives of rust".

The Rust community (in aggregate; I'd hope I wouldn't need to state the obvious that it doesn't apply to all individuals, but...Rust community) fosters this sort of melodrama.

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.

Its just so odd to me. It used to be that a language was like an impartial technology that could be evaluated. Back in the day would anybody ever say "wow those C++ people are noxious, I'm not going to use objects".

Sadly yes, it's not a new thing. Lisp is a good example of an old language that attracted a very particular community around it that did put some people off.

Guess, now that I think about it, Python and the 'white' spaces was kind of drama. But think it was still about technical merits, like do you prefer that style or not, don't remember the 'community' being melodramatic.

Putting all the drama aside, "clearspaces" would be better, no? What if my editors background is black? Then whitespaces would stand out like white bars.

> It used to be that a language was like an impartial technology that could be evaluated.

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.

> they have to belittle and berate users of other languages because their choice (or not: employment is what it is) isn't "correct."

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.

Just search "rust" in HN comments (or on Reddit, or pretty much anywhere you see someone asking questions likely to invoke discussion about language choice): you'll find plenty.

I knew the people who come up with a compiler and syntax which just screams drama would also love drama in their real lives. That's why I stick with Go. No drama syntax, no drama conferences.

This comment feels like it could be from the show Silicon Valley, in a good way.

And an std lib that has all you need. And tooling that evolves in a direction of usefulness, not because it’s technically challenging.

>a compiler and syntax which just screams drama

A what now?

Yeah, what's up with ending everything with a question mark and pulling stunts like :#?, huh? /s

I was with you until this part: >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.

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.

He is saying there weren't any black speakers. Sure we can say how that should grow "organically", as some other poster did. But what if year in year out it doesn't happen? Maybe there aren't any black people in the Rust community and if they stepped forward with some good talks they would just be invited? Or maybe the situation is a little more complicated.

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.

> But what if year in year out it doesn't happen?

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. :(

I disagree that “nothing can be done”.

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.

>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.

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.

> 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.

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.

How many of <T> ethnicity are in the community?

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.

> No organisation should be "called out" for a lack of - insert-race-here- representation unless that organisation is in fact discriminatory.

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.

I'll risk the downvotes then.

> 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.

> How can intelligent people not see this kind of thinking leads to the worst of social divisions?

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.

I don't think it's racist, but I do think it's tunnel vision and not taking into context in the greater context of society. There is obviously and undeniably a paucity of black people in STEM. So yeah, I think that having someone get a +1 for being a POC in a group of several +1's in choosing something like a keynote speaker. It's a chicken-and-egg problem in STEM. It should never be the sole determination, but if you're down to keynote speaker of basically identically talented keynotes, then being a non-white person can be that +1 to make a decision. Fairness does not always equate to exactly the same treatment

I see where you're coming from and it's clear you have strong feelings on this matter. However, I believe there might be a misunderstanding here. The goal of diversity initiatives isn't about devaluing any particular group, it's about ensuring that the opportunities and benefits are more equitably distributed across different communities.

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.

When were these supposed "systemic issues" ever identified? In my experience "systemic racism" is a vague pretext to implement racist policies that push out white people (and sometimes Asians) in favor of black people (and people considered "brown enough"). I see this at my job and at conferences: people are explicitly promoted or selected as speakers in part because they are not white (or not male). This isn't just something I observed, they say it openly when the "diversity", equity, and "inclusion" strategy is discussed. I've also seen conference attendees openly say that there should be fewer white males at a certain event.

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.

There are actually lots of initiatives to increase gender diversity in early childhood education.

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.

I don't disagree that historical systemic discrimination has effects that lasts generations and I'm not against affirmative action when applied carefully, but I think it's presumptuous and counterproductive to try to "counterbalance" a perceived systemic bias that occurred in the past at one level (for example in education), today at another level (employment or public speaking opportunities).

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.

The internet doesn’t equalize things like hiring and conference representation though. Imho it’s a complete non sequitur to this discussion about the real world.

I think assuming that the anonymity afforded by the internet extends to real life is naive.

What does anonymity have to do with this?

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.

Having access to knowledge isn’t an equalizer in terms of biases in the real world though.

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.

> Have you been judged by the color of your skin

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?

Told to attend less because there needed to be space for other demographics? That’s not discrimination because it’s not preventing white men from attending, it’s just allowing other people to also attend unless you believe that you’re also somehow better than everyone who was allowed to attend.

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.

I'm sorry but discouraging white males from attending a conference has approximately nothing to do with "allowing other people to also attend". It's a weird brand of discrimination (racism and sexism) based on the unfounded idea that any coveted group must have a racial and sexual profile equivalent to that of an arbitrary overall population. Additionally, there would be no need to exclude people on the basis of their race and sex if the minorities they'd like to include simply participated in the desired proportions, and in fact equity programs originally prioritized outreach to achieve that, but as it turns out, few industries have a demographic profile that matches the overall population. Therefore some have turned to racist and sexist exclusion.

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.

You are talking past each other. I just see bad faith.

> 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.

"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.

> The goal of diversity initiatives isn't about devaluing any particular group

It is, however, always the result.

What makes you think speaker slots aren't equitably distributed? If there are 4 black Rust devs among every 100 Rust devs and there are 10 speaker slots, odds are there are no black speakers but that would still be an equitable distribution.

For more context, post from the previously invited keynote speaker about what happened: https://thephd.dev/i-am-no-longer-speaking-at-rustconf-2023

So now there are two stories from the one of the sides, is there any stories from the other sides? Namely, from the people who felt so "uncomfortable" about a technical topic that they had to uninvite a keynote speaker?

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.

Reading between the lines, they were uncomfortable about the implication that keynote speech = product direction, for a talk that they didn't want to be perceived as a product direction. Seems like something that can be fixed with a disclaimer slide or maybe better decision making up front.

Not yet, though to be fair, it is Memorial Day weekend and this emerged on Friday evening.

His blog is call The pasture and has a bunch of sheep looking characters, could it be that people got uncomfortable about his furry implications maybe?

As a non-american I must say I don't understand where the latter half of the article comes from. Why care about race? Why must a racist reason be sought behind everything?

This stood out to me as well. Granted, the person people felt "uncomfortable" about only later tweeted out that the 0% black representation was an outlier, but I haven't heard much reason why this is relevant yet.

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.

Have you ever been the victim of losing a position because you weren't white? Have you even been turned down for a loan because you weren't white or straight or were “different”. That's why it's a big deal. It isn't everything, but it is a factor all over in America. I seriously don't believe anyone who says it isn't also an issue in other places as well. I lived in Europe for a year in various parts and heard racist talk just as surely as I have as an American, so don't tell me that it's not an issue in other countries, I know it is. Racism is just a subset of ethnic discrimination. It was a little more subtle in most cases, but it was there.

Life is unfair and some people will use anything they can, whether it be race or whatever, to get ahead. I did the same thing when I was younger: I wrote a book at age 15 and marketed it as being written by a teenager to get sales. In this case, I played into my age rather than race, but the idea is the same.

In a culture that values free speech and critical thought, why would you expect anybody to stay silent about the elephant in the room?

And where do you live that inequities have never existed?

what the previous comment probably meant is that in many countries there is no elephant in the room

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 think it's just SJW mudslinging. Imply someone's a racist and they spend so much time defending themselves against the accusation that people just start to assume they're racist. Activist cultures have the nastiest in-fighting.

I mean, sometimes it’s not one’s race—sometimes it’s sexuality, gender, religion, disability, or some other variable that I missed. And people in America think along those variables because they have a history of disenfranchising and discriminating people along those axes.

Unironically, Americans think like this because they're more progressive than Europeans (some, anyway; some are way less). Europe has a history of disenfranchisement too, and to the extent they don't see it much it's because they have more homogeneous societies (until recently, with refugees). The melting pot of the new world was always life on higher difficulty: you don't get to be racist while pretending you're not because you're never tested on it as a society. You don't get to outlaw slavery, posturing like you're doing it because you're just that virtuous when in reality it's because it's easy to do when your economy doesn't rely on slavery so it's an easy way to look good. In this crucible, minds are traumatized into reverse-racism and performative bullshit.

I once got a talk demoted from a normal talk to a lightning talk at some unrelated conference to make it work with the schedule. That was indeed not nice. But also not "Cruelty". I just acted professionaly and accepted the change.

I think it would have also been perfectly professional to decline in that case, since it's clearly poor planning on the part of the folks organizing the talk. And demoting the keynote speaker is even worse - especially when in this instance something like scheduling doesn't seem to be the excuse

It is always professional to remove yourself from unprofessional situations.

Was it a talk that you submitted on your own choice, or were you asked to give the original talk? In this case, the speaker was asked to keynote-speak, when they had not planned on doing so.

How long was the talk you originally wrote, perhaps they thought there wasn't enough content for a full one (playing advocate)?

If there are malicious actors, by "acting professionally" (probably meaning to ignore your emotions) you are allowing those who are malicious, and do not act professionally, to continue doing that.

Others acting professionally is the best outcome for those who do not do so.

Melodrama from the blog post aside, publicly downgrading a talk for an industry wide conference is very much a slap to a speaker's face.

"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.

Make a joke about it in the presentation. This talk was downgraded to get less visibility. So I’ve renamed the talk to “What Rust leadership doesn’t want you to know”.

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.

Thanks for sharing. Lots to chew over.

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.

Rust could be a nice language if it wasn't for its insufferable "community".

I've lost track of the amount of things where the thing itself is cool but the fan club is insufferable.

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

The rust community is great, but definitely avoid the power structures. Thats the same for any niche programming language by the way. That said rust does seem to have a lot of public drama, the whole team or something quit last year, I don't remember. Just remember OSS is a game of trying to get people to do a lot of work for zero compensation beyond social recognition or the fun of doing things... There's going to be a lot of slimy stuff around the organizations behind that.

This behavior is the Rust leadership team is completely juvenile. Y'all need to grow up.

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.

Is there anything more pathetic than the internecine fighting of a bunch of nerds? The level of emotional maturity and “life experience” on display is of a 15 year old level, at best. The fact that this is still going for many days after the fact proves my point. The histrionics over a very minor slight is over the top. Just quit it.

what does "internecine" mean?

> 1 : of, relating to, or involving conflict within a group

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/internecine

The world has become a sad and pathetic place. If you're "uncomfortable", whatever that means, don't watch, whether we're talking about a speech, a TV program, etc. Don't try to ruin it for everyone else. You're just not that important. Life is filled with discomfort. You can't cancel them all. And as you get older, the discomforts keep coming. That's the real world. And when you retire and the doctors tell you that you have cancer or heart disease, that too will be uncomfortable. And guess what, you don't get to cancel that, because life really doesn't care if you're uncomfortable. Grow up world.

The world has always been a sad and pathetic place, it just shifts over time on what people consider that to be. It's also a joyous and wondrous place if you let it be. Humans have been caught in the same for loop since we became conscious and capable of higher order thinking. The amount of enlightenment has been waxing and waning over time but with an upward trend line since that point in time.

What's up with all the petty drama in the Rust community.. is it uniquely problematic?

No, open source is just like this now.

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.

There is and always has been a problem parallel to this: People who are part of a group they believe to be fundamentally segregated and discriminated against are much more likely to let this influence their judgement.

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.

You are wrongfully framing him as someone taking advantage of his minority "status". If you read the explanation by Jeanheyd Meneide himself you will see that it's not about that at all.

https://thephd.dev/i-am-no-longer-speaking-at-rustconf-2023

>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.

It's easy to miss the discrimination when you're not a member of the affected group.

Unfortunately being in the position of, “I don’t see color” or “I don’t care about your sexuality” might work in an ideal world but leads to more inequality in the real world.

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.

> 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

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.

> LGBTQ > neurodiverse > greater awareness of oneself as a member of certain classes.

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.

Holy crap. How do I shield myself from this political bullshit and keep simply coding?

meditating on the void does it for me :)

>Fully 25% of Gen Z identify as LGBTQ.

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.

>Keep your sexual and romantic life to yourself in a programming community.

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?

And normal (aka non-insufferable) people would just frame these pretty much in the same exact way?

- 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?

I think we’re talking at cross purposes. My list isn’t intended to be a list of things that only straight people do. I’m in a gay marriage myself, so I’m perfectly aware that gay people can have spouses, children, etc. My point is exactly that gay people should be free to mention all the things on the list in just the same way that straight people regularly do (in programming communities and many other contexts).

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.

I don't see evidence that there is more drama in the Rust community than in other communities. Posts with Rust in the title just have better chances to make it to the HN frontpage.

Similar things might happen in other communities but Rust drama seems much more visible, and this isn't because of HN bias - the foundation having weird guidelines, controversy around governance, prominent people in the community badmouthing other languages in bad faith, now this. It's quite ugly.

I also think part of it is rust’s unique and complex governance model. Python, Go, C++, Ruby and Nodejs all had (mostly) a single leader who was in charge of the project for the first few years and who set the tone for the decisions which came after. If there was drama like this in Python, Guido would step in and that would have been that.

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.

How ironic that Rust should have the most problems arising as a result of shared ownership.

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…

I don't think its ironic. Its just that a shared ownership model is more complex than having a single person in charge, making decisions. And its a reasonably new idea - not many of us have the experience and skills we need to make it work. Inevitably, more mistakes happen.

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.

Still, how much simpler, more efficient, and less drama-filled would it be with fewer people, and particularly with a single person in charge? It's like the inefficiency of a prematurely distributed system full of microservices versus a monolith that runs just fine on a single modest machine.

You're still going to need a team of people to do all sorts of $stuff with a BFDL, and when people get involved conflicts happen. Python has been without a BFDL for almost 5 years, and seems to be doing fine. I'm not so sure this is a huge factor.

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.

I think op is making a rust joke more than anything else.

You understand a central tenant of Rust is forbidding shared ownership?

Oh, whooosh. Thankyou.

It illustrates the weakness of this model of governance, with no clear leader. Politics can tear a project apart, and even ill-intentioned actors that do not want the project to do well can infiltrate and cause divisions. When a leader/founder is the BDFL, they usually want the project to keep flourishing according to their original (or evolving) vision.

Sorry, but no. The leaders in the Rust community appear to be particularly tone deaf and on a power trip. I think the explosions going off in their faces are needed right now.

What would the evidence you are looking for look like?

Ruby certainly has had it's own trials and tribulations. Linux had that whole code of conduct fiasco, but it does seem that rust has those trumped when it comes to internal politics.

Rust was forged by a close-knit group since they were working at Mozilla, I think the culture has not been able to adapt to the growth since then.

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.

I think what you are seeing is a community with problems like any other community, but which has a significant amount of people who are willing to risk public visibility in order to fight and fix them.

Other communities either try to actively hide problems, or handwave them as "boys will be boys shrug".

You start a project that aims to be inclusive of everyone you end up with people who aren't accepted anywhere else.

In short: gates are there for a reason.

BDFL or atomic leadership-led groups are more streamlined and decisions tend to be less questioned, dissidents are erased out and egos crushed. It's easier because all the gravitas, and all the blame, is pinned to a monolith. "When he/she/it woke, the dinosaur was still there" would say Guatemalan writer Monterroso.

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.

I'll obviously not stop using Rust over this -- and I think 99.99% of the people using Rust for work will not stop using it either -- but this looks like a case where the underlying true issue (sidestepping a democratic process) was very quickly forgotten and people started arguing over the expressions of the problem using dramatic and exaggerated language, which just makes things worse because it makes other people jumpy. And it spiraled out of control extremely quickly because you know, people are being people. Oh well. Hopefully the dust settles and they can figure it out.

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.

It's unlikely there is anyone in a position of authority in Rust consciously and nefariously excluding black folks and other people of color, but there doesn't need to be. It's a self-reinforcing problem that requires conscious effort to address. I'm a (nonblack) minority, and I tend to actively avoid participation in groups where I know I'm not likely to be understood in important ways. It can be pretty fucking exhausting being the only X

Fair, but let's recognize the fact that nobody has stopped you at the door.

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.

You blame others for your own anxieties that stop you from participating?

All of the "social" aspects of programming are full of drama.

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’m beginning to wonder whether conferences themselves are worth it in general. There’s so much content on YouTube that if your objective is learning new things, hitting that up or reading a book may be simpler (and much less expensive).

Also the content is usually either derivative or quite basic. Most speakers are just professional evangelists so they just speak without actual practical experience. They also just tour the world doing the same talk over and over again.

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.

I used to love going to the Game Developers Conference (and I probably still would if not for costs), but I have found that I can get just as much out of youtube outside of networking.

> All of the "social" aspects of programming are full of drama.

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.

I know for a fact there has been 4 or 5 occurrences at C++ conferences within the past two years.

The original event this post was referring to, was someone dropping out of a conference because they were asked to give a keynote talk and then pulled from it last moment. They decided to opt out of the lack of professionalism and not go. Nothing to do with LGBTQ. Internet nerd drama has existed since the dawn of Usenet and IRC.

It looks like JeanHeyd is unwittingly used as a weapon in a conflict internal to the Rust leadership. It look to me as an escalation of the conflict : - First, a power move to invite someone outside of the community that have a strong point of view on a technical subject. As any organisation, you have to make move to make your agenda move forward. - Second, an escalation with the uninvite. Not polite, but asserts the power you have within the organisation. - Third, a resignation with a strong post that is another level of conflict.

What will happen next ?

I’m glad someone else had this read.

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.

As someone who doesn't follow very closely, the amount of drama around Rust seems to be something unseen among open source projects before.

Is it that BDFL-based governance just works better, or do people have higher expectations from Rust community than from, say, Linux one?

Ruby's Matz counts as a BFDL, does he? Because there was plenty of drama in that area...

Like what? It might I am not that interested in the language or HN is not that interested in the language, but I can't remember anything.

There even used to be a rubydramas.com site, if I remember correctly (parked domain right now).

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.

Not for a long time. I think the drama queens might have moved on to another language.

Didn't Linux (used to ?) have regular drama because of Linus, erm, outbursts ?

Well, it existed for quite a long time before drama started, it was just one or two episodes, and was relatively short-lived. I haven't heard anything about Linux in that regard for quite a while, but Rust is in the news regularly. Linux kernel also has a much larger community.

> the amount of drama around Rust seems to be something unseen among open source projects before.

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 wept because of the cruelty. But I also wept because I helped create the system that could do this to someone.

I believe these must've been Oppenheimer's words

> as best as I understand it, because of the content of JeanHeyd's blog post on reflection in Rust.

I'm having trouble finding it. Can anyone link this post?

I believe, this is it: https://soasis.org/posts/a-mirror-for-rust-a-plan-for-generi...

Thanks!

posted a day or so ago and was flagged, I think it was this

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36091242

With this and the trademark drama it sure looks like leadership could do with a change of guards

This!

Preferably at least 50% women.

They’re working on it. RFC: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfc-leadership-council

Even if none of this was rooted in retribution or racism or unilateral decision making, the fact that a group representing some of the brightest developers working today did not have the foresight to see how this would play out in today's social climate, is too bad.

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.

For the Rust ignorants like me can someone be kind enough to explain who jntrnr is? The only info I can find is that he worked on Rust core. Can't find an about page or any other information about this personality?

Is his role significant enough that his departure from Rust will force Rust leadership to fix their internal problems?

Who is he. He was part of the 4 person "leadership" team and worked on the compiler team. He is one of the maintainer of nushell. He also used to work on Typescript. This is definitely someone with experience and knowledge in these areas and we are all poorer from losing him. I probably missed a lot of his other work, sorry.

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

Is this the same group who conjured up that _top-notch_ trademark policy? If so, how would the community go about removing them?

What is the deal with trademarks and rust? See a lot of people talking about it...

The Rust Foundation used a (per their excuse) "boilerplate" trademark policy. Somehow, a "boilerplate" trademark policy included terms about bearing arms (which has nothing to do with trademark, and is a concerning overreach regardless of how you feel about firearms) and other nonsense. The bullshit extended to "allowing" the community to use Ferris (to be clear, Ferris was already public domain and they had no say over it to begin with).

Weird thanks for filling me in. Uh yea I had no idea... Ferris is the little crab right?

> Is this the same group who conjured up that _top-notch_ trademark policy?

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."

https://thephd.dev/i-am-no-longer-speaking-at-rustconf-2023

It's almost worse that it's not The Foundation again. Now there's really no redeeming parts of Rust leadership.

I swear there’s more (public) drama in the Rust community than in every other language’s combined. This is really not engaging, it feels like the core team (what actually matters with a programming language) could implode at any time because someone sneezed wrong.

Jeez, I miss the days of strong open source leadership.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2lhwb_OckQ

That's what happen when you fanboy for a product, instead of using tools for what they are when you need them, you become their puppet, and they leverage you to push whatever BS they have in their pocket

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

There's more discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36090512 .

The article notably avoided the topic of WHY the technical talk was objected to.

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?

I see so much angst here, an awful lot of it hinging around:

* 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.

Languages that don’t have a built in police squad don’t have issues like this. The ‘community’ around Rust is its biggest handicap right now.

How come we can't have a technical discussion about reflection in a language without it degenerating into this kind of a shitshow?

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.

So basically “I don’t like your article” is enough to get a speaker removed in the rust conf / rust leadership space?

Ngl, that looks like teen drama.

Really poor leadership, it seems there wasn’t even an attempt at mediation, or a vote, or anything.

Yeah, and merely over some random technical article, not controversial politics or anything.

Well, for context the speaker pointed out in the past that there were no presenters of color at Rust conf at the time, and they themselves would have been the first person of color to do a keynote if they'd been allowed to do it.

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.

Well, not removed, just downgraded.

But yes, it does smell a bit drama-queen.

I’d say drama queens on both sides

> 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 wonder if Rust would be better off with a BDFL. It sounds like the antithesis of some of the governing goals that were established but perhaps it would deliver some consistency.

This looks to me like a shitty situation, handled badly, but... having read this thread backwards, starting with the HN comments, then JeanHeyd Meneide's own blog post about it, and finally the "Why I Left Rust" post being discussed here... I mean, shit happens? It's easy to fuck up when planning a big conference and sometimes you end up wasting the time of presenters, or (arguably worse) the audience, or (maybe the worst) sending the world the opposite of the message you intended, or some combination of those.

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:

Rust is supposed to help keep the programmer from shooting themself in the foot, but lately the Rust community/leadership keeps shooting itself.

I can try to summarize my understanding of events.

  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.

Totally understandable. Why waste more time with a community that can't discuss things critically even if they go against many ideas of the tech in question? Maybe a bit of an over reaction, but it's likely he knew a lot more of the community and what it's really like. This was likely the last straw.

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.

>A couple team members had strong opinions/discomfort against JeanHeyd being selected as a keynote speaker, as best as I understand it, because of the content of JeanHeyd's blog post on reflection in Rust

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.

I guess one real benefit of rust is that it will encourage C++ to find way to be a bit more safer. cpp2/cppfront is one such initiative, and there are a few other programming practices that encourage safety.

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.

As someone coming from Java, that's untrue. C looks like language written by the ancient ones.

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.

Do you mean “Ada”, the programming language? It's not an acronym.

C is a terrible language for beginners. It's full of footguns and restricted in different ways because the compiler had to once fit in a kilobyte of RAM or whatever. C programmers who defend how easy it is to mess up programs written in the language often go with "well if you knew how to program C well you wouldn't run into this problem, so get good" from what I can tell.

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.

First, the entire moderator team (BurntSushi et el) resigned citing inappropriate actions of a Rust core team member (details were not made public). Now JT resigns for a similar reason. Rust project governance has been a problem for a while and it seems to be getting worse.

Can someone explain to me the reasoning the original persons [1] blog post is flagged but not this one?

(I don't agree with flagging either)

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36091242

Can we acknowledge that we, software professionals, crave drama just like soap opera junkies?

Bro wtf is happening at rust. How does a programming language have this much drama WEEKLY

For completely unrelated reasons, I got into Rust this week again for the first time in years. I had to write a small bit of code that went really fast, but have sworn off C. It was really really fun, and I want to write more rust! (Though I don't get to write much code these days)

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.

If Linus suffered this sort of dictatorship of the code of conduct, where would the Linux kernel be today?

My guess is that it wouldn't have conquered every arena of computing outside of desktop computing like it has.

Let's take a step back for a moment. All of these people involved are working on the language that would/might be one of the big languages in the future. It doesn't fill me with hope.

I haven't started using Rust, but I feel quite concerned about getting invested in it if the leadership acts like this. The people responsible need to step down or make amends.

This continual tech industry drama, doesn't matter if one is talking Rust, Go, Node, or pretty much anything, technology industry members will treat their personal situations and perspectives as litanies of outrageous violations of their integrity.

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.

When presented with a vast malicious conspiracy, I try to default to Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained as stupidity.

But why not both? Malicious and stupid, the best of two worlds.

The irony of people in this thread bemoaning humanity, how we can't all just get along, while simultaneously blasting "woke" politics is palpable

"Woke" is not caring about people. "Woke" is tricking others into thinking you care about people.

My point was not that Woke is inherently good, but that you're shitting on other people while whining that they shit on you back.

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.

When is the Taylor swift concert?

There's one going on right now!

(Until August 9.)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eras_Tour

Organization that is “uncomfortable” with being criticized is always going to struggle to expand and adjust.

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.

Everyone involved seems... petty and immature at worst, overly sensitive at best.

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.

> It was JeanHeyd who called Rust out for having no Black representation among Rust conference speakers.

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.

I see. The proposed keynote made it about identity politics. I am going to side with the Rust Board on this one.

To me this was a great and necessary decision.

No it didn’t, what are you talking about? It was a strictly technical keynote

Thank you for reaching out. This is what I am talking about:

> "It was JeanHeyd who called Rust out for having no Black representation among Rust conference speakers."

So this person didn't get to speak at the conference, and they quit? But their technical contributions are still being added?

Did I get that right?

They quit because they didn't get a keynote slot. They were still invited to give a talk.

This is such a non-issue to me I'm surprised it's even at the top of Hacker News.

After the Kardashians, the world needs a new reality show: the rustaceans. Somewhere btw Dallas and the youth and the restless.

Emotional is cheap. Show me the algorithm (to resolve the whole process).

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 ?

It seems this is a case of poor decision and communication management rather than a machiavellian plot, however, it's no less harmful or toxic in the outcome.

I'm actually working on an app for organizations to make clear, fair, and transparent decisions systematically so things like this don't happen.

A member of the rust committe (Uber for C) well known for their histryonics makes a hystrionic blogpost about another rust community member acting hystrionic. The comments divide into two camps among US political lines and spend the rest of the time debating woke culture. No tech is discussed.

> A person in Rust ... reached directly to RustConf leadership and asked to change the invitation

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.

Exactly the kind of things that prevent me to approach Rust. Part of their community is very unwelcoming.

I think the title is "click bait-ish" because it implies the person stopped writing in Rust :D

No, he's a known compilers guy and it was known he worked on Rust.

People seem to conflate two things in this discussion: interpersonal issues (which are valid to talk about) and technical disagreements. Conflating these two can only lead to drama and reflects really poorly on the participants. Come on aren't we all adults here?!

So someone has a belief that some feature may have benefit the language, and people are stating they are uncomfortable? I suspect (as complete outsider) there has to be more going on here and the "uncomfortable" people are not being sincere & honest.

This reads like lots of drama ensued internally (whether justified or not) and now a person writes about it creating more drama externally, or at least tries to.

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.

We are the C. Resistance is futile. Your technological and paradigmatic distinctiveness will be added to our own. The syntax will be clunky. It will be full of dangerous and ugly ways to misuse it. You will be adapted to single pass compile. Lower your shields.

From my observations rustis are very much about drama. Reminds me also of the drama of Actix web. There’s also a video about it: https://youtu.be/enLUX1TtNyE Better Go :)

As someone picking between C and Rust for a new codebase, this is going on my list of "cons" for Rust. I'm supposed to build a product above all else. Will the drama get in the way of Rust surviving down the road?

People keep saying it has nothing to do with the language, but it pretty much has a lot of things to do with its development and its ecosystem. There are forks already out there because of the Rust committee.

A so-called "Leadership" cannot bring out of the conference what I think differently. Leadership must have the power of the word if it has a mind in the head. I think these are the traits of Leadership.

Yeah, thanks, but I'm gonna go ahead and stick with the language made by the earnest working class guy. You know, the one that everyone loves to complain about, but that everything is built with.

It seems like one scandal after another for Rust recently.

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.

It's not really about big picture societal politics, it's about internal politics, and no organisation can escape those, because that's what an organisation is.

The blog post sound reasonable until the racial part started.

Is this an accusation that the change was made on racial grounds? Otherwise I fail to see why mentioning it.

I love how everything has to be spun into something about race by the left. You win today's award for the Wokest Bloke.

I wouldn't say they made it about race. The main point of this post still the situation with JeanHeyd. However, a post like this is probably the best place to lay out some of the other issues concerning Rust's team, and representation is a very real issue! Of the people with bachelors+ degrees in computer science in the US, only 6% are black; under half of the population percentage of black Americans (https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf23315/report/stem-workforce-wi..., Figure 6-3)

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.

Rust is not a humnan, you are dealing with humans, and humans are flawed, accept it and protect what you care about.

The worst thing about this shitshow of a thread is that those of us accusing the Rust leadership of being woke and those of us accusing the blog post author of being woke don't seem to have gotten each other's memos.

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.

If they don't have bigger problems than that, I'd say it seems to be a pretty nice community...

Oh, boy... they do have bigger problems than that.

How does this kind of organizational drama affect me as an end user of the Rust programming language?

The conference used to offer different viewpoints, even if those viewpoints weren't the "official" ones by the Rust organization. It seems like they're changing this so only endorsed viewpoints will be represented in the conference, possibly leading to a stagnation of innovative ideas.

Time will tell what will happen, but when opposing viewpoints starts being hidden away, things tend to get relatively boring quickly.

On the other hand, as a conference attendee, I expect that the keynote talks reflect which direction Rust is going.

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)

It doesn't and shouldn't. The people in the Rust project will come and go, but the language will continue to be developed. Many contributers are not project members

It hurts the language. People who could help improve and advocate for the language think twice before getting involved. People want to feel good about their language of choice, see this use something else.

The so-called "Rust community" (As if that existed) and especially the Rust Foundation is going down blazingly fast, with all these pointless melodrama and tea time tantrums.

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.

The thing is, Rust is being marketed as end-all, be-all of memory safety and overall programming, Microsoft, Linux kernel, and other giants are picking it up and it’s a badge of honor.

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.

It doesn’t mean that Rust itself is a bad programming language.

Rust is a programming language.. emotionally charged articles like this one and the behaviour of the Rust leadership lately are both ridiculous.

Programmers want good stable languages that are a joy to work with. Everthing else but this can take a hike.

why did the they have discomfort? is it because of reflection of is it because he was a black dude? does someone know the answer?

Mostly because of Reflection. The "black dude", who was already featured a bunch of times on HN and works on C/C++ (we'll have #embed thanks to him) was invited as keynote speaker (start of the day).

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.

time to hard fork and create Virtuous Crablang

https://github.com/crablang/crab

Is there already a ChatGPT Plugin out to summarise blog posts?

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."

"Rust acted as a cruel, heartless entity that did not care about JeanHeyd and treated him as disposable. "

"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.

crablang was started as sort-of satire...if Rust folks aren't careful it might just take off

Do you mean memelang?

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35592005 ("CrabLang (crablang.org)", 77 comments)

I would have expected such a resignation after two weeks time to see whether the organization would improve their decision making process

Perhaps the person has already seen enough to decide this was the last straw.

valid

You are maybe missing the context that the organisation is already many months deep into attempting to improve their decision making process

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