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Comment by pie_flavor | Hacker News Reader

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

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There are two completely orthogonal questions here:

- Is the content of the talk suitable for a keynote?

- Given that the talk was accepted as a keynote, is it ok for the organizers to change their mind and unilaterally demote the talk?

https://hackmd.io/mwCWfJpIT024vBYvKeHCtw?view gives an informed perspective on the second question.

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

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

People inviting the author knew about the content and the author double checked if they're ok with that direction. This wasn't a surprise or something missed. The original vote was done by enough people who can make the decisions.

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

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

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

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

What do you mean?

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