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Comment by junon | Hacker News Reader

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?

View on HN

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

>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

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

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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 :)

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

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.

Looks like the Rust community could use some reflection ;)

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

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.

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.

>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.

>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."

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.

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?

>> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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

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.

> 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?

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.

> 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.

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

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.

Rust leadership have a lot to reflect on.

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

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