Rust: The wrong people are resigning | Hacker News Reader

Rust: The wrong people are resigning

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295 pointsSmileyKeith317 comments

> The recent incident with ThePHD’s keynote downgrade was not racially motivated, thankfully, but… if that’s what it looks like from the outside, and any form of official communication is still days or weeks away, does it really make a difference?

yes! it does!

we can't keep framing everything as race, gender, or orientation related. people have to have basic filters for what the most important issue is in a situation. stop falling back to "easy" outs or making sweeping statements about the "deeper systemic problem".

there are plenty of social problems which can't be solved by attaching every motive to every situation

I believe the reason they are saying it doesn’t matter, is that without a clear statement of what happened from the decision makers, people can speculate.

One of those things people will speculate on is if this was one of the reasons. The fact that it is also part of the equation means it can’t be outright ignored and so will also need to be addressed. On top of that, this is already an underrepresented group, and regardless of if it was a primary motivating factor, it does not help show that group that they are welcome and in fact harms any effort to do so.

It absolutely matters if it was or was not a factor in this decision, but without clear information about the decision making process, speculation will occur, and that in and of itself is harmful.

I vehemently disagree. Unless there is reason to suspect race is a factor, which there is none in this case, then discussion should move on the issue at hand, and speculation about racism should be discouraged or ignored. Your perspective, while well intentioned, is exactly the sort that drives needless division and suspicion in modern discourse.

To be clear, you do not believe that the Rust Leadership should make it clear how they came to this decision such that any speculation of other reasons can be put to bed?

The fact that it’s open to speculation is the exact reason they need to address it. Just ignoring it at this point doesn’t seem like a good idea, does it?

Your “to be clear” bears no resemblance at all to what was written.

No, I absolutely think they should make that clear. But among all the reasons they made this decision, however opaque things have been thus far, I think it’s wrong to speculate that the cause is racism.

What are you vehemently disagreeing with me about then?

That race is a reasonable suspicion until barring further explanation/transparency. And additionally the “to be clear” refrain.

It might not be reasonable, but it is likely.

why?

upon what basis could you possibly make this claim?

Humans engage in tribalism and racism regularly.

Thus someone might assume something of that sort is at play here, though it might be an unreasonable assumption for reasons x, y, and z.

shameful

See my response to Tremon but resorting to an ad hominem based on an (incorrect) assumption of how I judged the situation is both rude and a waste of time.

it's not an ad hom—it's shameful to truly believe that all or even just most "racist" people actively take action upon their racism, given any opportunity to do so, even when it's completely obvious that said racism-based action could be obviously traced back to the person in a position of organizational leadership such that they could take said action, and that such a person is even remotely likely to exist at the top of the Rust Foundation, and that they're just so gosh-darned racist that they impulsively act upon their racism at every possible opportunity, even in blatant defiance of basic corporate self-preservation instincts, such that there's any mere semblance of a shred of a possibility that this action was "because racism." shamefully delusional, there's no way around it.

Look man, in my opinion, in the current political climate this is clearly on the short list of possible bad takes for this tech scandal (hate the phrase, but it fits).

That is why this thread even exists in the first place.

That was my whole point.

You calling me "shamefully delusional" is definitely an ad hominem no matter how many words you try to stuff in my mouth.

It takes a low mind to think low.

I don't appreciate the insult, especially saying I have a "low mind" whatever that means.

I am not racist. I wouldn't wager that this was race related. But I wouldn't say that someone seeing the situation, and then making the assumption that is it is race related, is out of the realm of possibility.

I would think that would be an unfortunate, but frequent, take away if the average person evaluated things at surface level.

You can disagree with me here, maybe with a Gallup poll for example, without insulting me.

Just because this is a sensitive topic doesn't mean you get to throw around insults and look down on another person.

hm, to me the opposite seems more likely. Rust community/leadership/confs/organizers seem very far from racism. some idiotic internal petty/interpersonal conflict seems much more likely IMHO.

How do you define "reason to suspect"? E.g. what separates the actions that would result from your position from the actions that would result from a position of "there's nothing wrong with racism as long as it's not said aloud"? Established behavioral patterns? Less than that? More?

I vehemently disagree. The possible motives of those in power should always be looked at with a microscope, unless they give us comprehensive reasons as to the decisions they made. Your perspective, while well intentioned, is exactly the sort that drives implicit bias and a disregard for minority considerations or reasoning that the decision makers don't personally relate to.

> The possible motives of those in power should always be looked at with a microscope

There are myriad possible motives. Looking at them all without evidence is not productive. I would say that all credible motives and reasons should be examined. But speculating about every or any possible motive without evidence or meaning is a waste of time at best.

Speculation always devolves to a waste of time if extending indefinitely without reality checking. When it comes to people in power the speculation can, at the very least, encourage them to be loquacious with respect to the reasons for their decisions.

I agree, but it seems you reworded my common with little deviation??

I deviated what I thought was the important part, and left the rest undeviated to send a message. If you agree, then we have no issue. It's fine to assume racism until the person demonstrates otherwise. And if assuming racism prompts them to so demonstrate, then it's to the good.

If the one black guy in the entire convention had his talk downgraded through back-channel means, I would suspect race had to do with it (if only obliquely, in that often black peoples actions are often received in much less good faith than other races). If it was actually just general leadership incompetence I think that would be important to highlight. It’s super weird when the only black guy gets sus behavior, but it’s less weird if leadership has been sus for a while and it just happened to drive off the one black guy.

The problem with assuming race has something to do with it is, you don’t learn the author’s race as you read his blog and interact with him via git.

So you must assume either that the decision makers knew through other channels, or that without knowing, they’re out-crowding him via subconscious selectors.

If you think this is a race thing, you probably think everything is a race thing.

Humans are capable of consuming information that is not from blogs or git so I have no idea what you're trying to convey here

Well I mean very clearly the community knew he was black. That’s why this discussion is being had. It’s not like the guys talk was downgraded and he went “surprise!! You can’t downgrade me because I’m black!!”. No, everyone knew he was the sole black person doing a talk in the entire event and he was the sole person who was downgraded in a backchannel, opaque manner. I would think that to be sus.

Yeah, okay.

I didn’t know that ThePHD was black. I think you paint “the community” as more homogenous and informed than it is. But I understand that the involved parties are aware of each other’s races.

I understand, then, a need to speculate on racism. But how do you advance from speculating about racism to inferring that it is or isn’t?

> But how do you advance from speculating about racism to inferring that it is or isn’t

I mean that’s why the original “btw this didn’t have to do with his race” statement existed. If you’re (hypothetical you) giving special, opaque treatment to the sole black person in the group, then it’s on you to clear up any speculation the opaque treatment had to do with being black, because it was only happening to the sole black person.

So the leadership did an opaque thing to the sole black guy and then clarified the weird thing had nothing to do with his blackness, just their poor communication or whatever.

There is reason to suspect race is a factor: the facts of who was disinvited and how they were treated. There is also reason (the word “uncomfortable” in JT’s post) to suspect people are weaponizing DEI language and sensitivities as an “I win” button to boot the speaker, which ironically is having the opposite effect than what DEI initiatives generally intend.

I really don't agree, reading the original poster's experience, that we should walk away thinking that it was because they're black. Nor should we by default assume that's the case. Multiple follow-ups by people in the Rust community have said that the politics and behavior here are a wider issue with leadership.

If the takeaway or speculation is that what went wrong here was only an issue because the speaker is black, it cheapens their experience. It tells other minorities that when they flag a problem, the root cause is their race/gender/orientation; that the solution is then a code of conduct refresh, maybe diversity training, "educating themselves", etc. But that is not, fundamentally, as far as we can see, what is wrong here. We are not respecting the deep issues that the OP actually did identify by projecting other speculative possibilities.

What happened here is a problem no matter who the speaker was. Let's address that. If other evidence comes to light on the backing motivations, we can address those to, but it's not helpful to voluntarily pull other bad behavior that there is no reason to suspect here. No one can disprove a negative, but it's on all of us to not fall for that bait.

> without a clear statement of what happened from the decision makers, people can speculate

People can always speculate whatever they want. And let's be honest, the kind of people who like making utterly baseless claims about racism will do so regardless of any official statements or explanations. Unless there's actual evidence of racial animus it's best to just ignore these silly people.

Society should condemn unwarranted accusations of racism as negatively as racism itself.

My first guess was the because ThePHD did a lot to push C23 forward, this might have been seen as a 'betrayal' to the Rust community - but maybe my imagination is a bit too wild, at least that’s what I hope.

I don’t think the article is saying we should make everything into a question of race. Only that if Rust doesn’t reply, people will make up their mind, and people usually devolve to the lowest common denominator, which, in this case, is a race issue.

> lowest common denominator

Occam's razor and salience come in to play here too.

I think it matters in so far as people who “don’t fit in” to a group often feel excluded from the group, and seeing people like you honored makes you feel more welcome. As a bunch of nerds surely we know what it feels like to be the odd man out. But what if you’re the odd man out in every context except for your family? What if you are the only one like yourself, the only one who when you walk in a room people stop talking and shift uncomfortably? Even in a room full of nerdy outsiders, you’re the outsider outsider. I don’t believe racism entered into the decision. But in tossing aside an opportunity to honor a black engineer for their legitimately earned achievements, you take away a chance to make that uncomfortable black engineer who feels outside the group a part of that group, and that is a shame. It doesn’t have to be the only decision making criteria. But in my life, opening doors to people and making the uncomfortable feel comfortable is important. I at least remember being socially uncomfortable and feeling like no one is like me at many points in my life. I know how that feels, and I know my experience was a shadow of what a black person experiences daily in the US, and in tech in particular where they are essentially unrepresented. Y’all don’t have to care how folks feel around you, but I was raised to love my neighbor, and small gestures to make entire classes of people feel welcome in my field when all evidence bears they’re not, I’ll take it.

The last few incidents have been damaging with or without communication. For large companies who need stability to ship software - the Rust story has been one of what looks like a good language being destroyed by shitty leadership and shitty drama.

If all you care about is appearances, it doesn't matter at all whether discrimination actually took place. If you do actually care about discrimination, it matters quite a lot whether it happened.

> we can't keep framing everything as race, gender, or orientation related.

No one is doing this, problem solved.

Maybe the downgrade not, but the original keynote was, but we can only guess. I don't think it's popular to vote against a black person being the keynote speaker.

At the same time this keynote is nowhere near as interesting as last year's async stabilization keynote, I think we can all agree on that.

If his talk would have been anything like his blog posts, I’d expect it to be brilliant

You should have called this account rustreturnerr.

In a way, I find this entire saga incredibly funny. There is so much hand wringing and pearl clutching at something that is supposedly in the shadows - this cabal of four or five people making decisions - that it makes the entire Rust "community" look juvenile. This is the kind of internecine conflict I should see in Anime discord servers, not about a language whose governance involves multiple major corporations!

Corporations being childish? Why I never.

Seems similar to how The Unredacted was cancelled at Sundance, a much more high profile and internationally relevant affair.

Wish we had more role models these days who were willing to disagree with decisions and work to fix them rather than loudly resign or point fingers. Feels like there is a lot of pressure these days that if you are part of a "bad" system then _you_ are bad, even if you are trying to improve it from the inside. So it's understandable people quit instead of taking on the burden of having to prove their "goodness", it's just a shame our media/algorithms lazily spread outrage rather than spotlight diligence and compromise.

I feel that some people exceed in technical prowess while lacking in emotional maturity and intelligence

Golang has lots of good examples of design discussions without vitriol in their RFCs and proposals. There is the occasional bikeshedding and needless bickering granted, but it mostly stays civil and is the most mature language community I've ever had the pleasure of being a part of.

Benevolent dictators make things way easier.

Clearly the solution is to clone Russ Cox.

That made me laugh thanks.

I think there might be a connection between Go's pragmatism and the culture fostered around it and Rust's correctness and its culture.

On the other hand, it could be that Google owning Go makes the bigger difference. I know that Ian Lance Taylor created several versions of generics that got shot down, which must have been frustrating. However, I don't remember hearing the slightest bit of internal conflict from the core team. (I pick on generics because it was the largest and longest "conflict" in Go's history.)

The primary language developers/owners work at the same company, so presumably they have more bandwidth (behind closed doors) and more financial incentive to provide a united front. Or, they're just a pragmatic group of engineers with drama turned to -11.

Similarly, in the C#/.NET community, most of the drama fits one of the following two archetypes:

1) MS taking control of something the community doesn't want them taking control of

2) Important open source third party library switching to a proprietary license

Rarely do you see drama centered around specific individuals like you see in the Rust or JavaScript communities. So I think that lends some further credence to your theory that the design goals of the language help foster specific cultures around them.

> I know that Ian Lance Taylor created several versions of generics that got shot down, which must have been frustrating.

I always felt like he wrote down those non-final designs more as an effort to discover & document why exactly each one wasn't good enough, so they might guide the future design(s). I think he was well aware of the various flaws and unwanted trade-offs, and wanted them to serve as a guide to the conversation.

Almost all of the work the rust project does is like this too. The RFC process is pretty consistently lovely. People just go back and forth talking about different design approaches with respect and thoughtfulness. I wish decisions happened faster, but decisions certainly get made and everyone is listened to.

These conversations just don’t make the front page of HN.

So does Rust. And Golang also has good examples of bad design discussions with vitriol, such as the one about metrics collection. This is a silly comparison.

The drama around Go modules comes immediately to mind as a counterexample – and that one was a technical snafu that impacted many projects using Go. Pobody’s nerfect.

> Wish we had more role models these days who were willing to disagree with decisions and work to fix them rather than loudly resign or point fingers.

You're kind of stating this as if nobody in the Rust ecosystem tries that approach first.

I took it as referring to the world in general, not Rust specifically. It happens every day in the news that someone loudly resigns to make their point. It's much less common that you see an article about how so-and-so spent five years of their life working hard to change a culture from the inside and finally is seeing results.

You can certainly try to view it that way, but I would submit that, at best, you're being overly charitable regarding interpretation when the very thread we're on is centered on discussing issues within the Rust ecosystem itself.

Oh, they're certainly meaning it to also refer to the situation at hand. I took it as "I wish we had more role models that would stay in and stand up, because the people loudly resigning in this case are copying others they've seen loudly resign."

lolinder is exactly right on what I meant to say (including what they said in the sibling post to this comment). But I hear your point, too, Klonoar. It's definitely worth pointing out that people can have good reasons for "going public" after realizing they couldn't fix things from the inside.

The "don't leave, stay and fix things from the inside" pitch is how the political schemers try to pull the tech talent back into an arena where they can be worn down into submission, so that their skills can be co-opted by those whose only real talent is to steal the productivity of others.

The only way to free a project from such entrenched rot is an ultimatum; "You can have the builders or the schemers, but not both".

Not just tech.

Agree with you that in the case of entrenched rot there's not much that "stay and fix things from the inside" can do to help. I just don't think that the Rust community/leadership has gotten to that point. OP's blog seems to support that, too:

> I was able to reassure myself, by checking these private discussion places, that there were good people, fighting for the right thing to be done. That things weren’t irremediably broken. That there was hope for improvement in the near future.

“If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders - What would you tell him?"

I…don't know. What…could he do? What would you tell him?"

To shrug.”

Agreed. Evil wins because good does nothing. Or in this case, evil reigns because good resigns.

Any reccomendations for Anime discord channels?

Yes. Join none of them.

Oh come now, surely there must be one good... well, one decent... one not entirely terrible one out there, right?

It doesn't seems hard to create a good one. Just post Akira pictures and Tetsuo memes, and that's it. What else would anyone ever want from an anime Discord? Okay, okay, a few threads about the NGE remakes/rebuilds from time to time. But no mention of Netflix disaster shenanigans, only Edgerunners. Well, okay, whatever the new GitS SAC thing was it was pretty good, so sometimes that too.

The Rust community server is pretty fun

These are the HN interactions I love.

Most discords you can find on the discover tab are too big to be fun, so I’d suggest looking for communities around specific anime you like and branching from there.

Are you suggesting there’s a difference in how conflict is handled in major corps vs anime discords? I think you’re doing a disservice to anime discords everywhere…

>This is the kind of internecine conflict I should see in Anime discord servers

Anime/furry culture has a significant overlap with the Rust community as far as I can tell as an outsider. E.g. there was that guy developing a Linux GPU driver for M1 Macs, narrating it with an anime "waifu" avatar and a speech plugin that makes you sound like a little girl from a Japanese cartoon.

s/guy/woman

Huh? A cursory google search says it's a guy called Hector Marcan. Is this wrong?

As far as I know, this person, who goes by “Asahi Lina” is not Hector Marcan.

I think the widespread belief is Asahi Lina is an avatar for Hector.

I'm not sure it's a widespread belief, but I did some quick searches and the circumstantial evidence[1][2] seems to lean toward that. Wow, this is pretty strange[3].

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35251905#35252948

2. Bunches of other threads on HN/Reddit/Twitter.

3. I don't mean this disparagingly.

I suspect the person you are replying to is thinking of Alyssa Rosenzwig[0] who appears from the outside to be a major contributor to the work, and who's blog posts on the project were followed by the HN crowd.

[0]: https://rosenzweig.io/blog/asahi-gpu-part-7.html

It's Asahi Lina that's implied in this case, even if Alyssa also has worked on GPU

Asahi Lina is the vtuber, not Hector

Huh? I'm not sure I follow you.

As far as I can tell, this "Asahi Lina" is a cartoon figure, that's used for lip-syncing with a voice effect. Are you saying the real person behind the cartoon is also called "Asahi Lina"?

Asahi Lina is who they identify as. It is likely a pseudonym but I see no source for any other name. So I have no reason to believe it's Hector. I would rather not make assumptions about someone beyond what they present themselves as, so as far as I'm concerned, they are Asahi Lina She/Her

Ok, but we can still make an educated guess on who's behind the fictional cartoon character...

To what end?

I'm not sure I understand the question... Because normally you'd want to discuss the work/actions of a human person, not an animated picture? :D

people have gone by pseudonyms for ages in the culture around hackers and computers generally. I don't see why we shouldn't do the same here.

In the culture of virtual youtubing, discussing anything past the character and their content is a faux pas.

On 4chan's /vt/ the euphemism for this is "roommate" discussion, and any posting of details about "roommates" is a bannable offense.

Of course being 4chan some users will eat bans (primarily when they're upset and want to spite other users), so some details of some known roommates do inevitably surface from time to time; but ultimately casual discussion of it is taboo.

Cool, I guess. But I'm not in the (niche) culture of virtual youtubing, so I don't see why I should talk about a digital cartoon as if it was a real person :D

Hope you understand!

You don't have to be part of a culture to respect someone's personal identity and privacy

Wait, what? You're saying the guy's identity is an anime cartoon? Like, you think we should pretend he is a cartoon? You must be trolling... It's like saying that we should pretend the voice actor of Spongebob is really a cartoon sponge :D

I mean, I'm fine with people pretending that. But you can't expect or force me and others to play along... :D

It's not remotely the same as Spongebob. The point is that whoever is behind Asahi Lina wants the character to be separate to their "real" identity. No-one is claiming they really are a digital cartoon. The request is to respect the clear wishes of the creator. It doesn't take anything from us to do so, and for all we know, they may have serious reasons for asking us.

Sorry, I can't talk seriously about a cartoon as if it was a real being :D

If the creator wants to stay anonymous (for which the cat is out of the bag in this case, I'm afraid) we may refer to him as "the guy behind the cartoon", but I can't pretend that the cartoon is the real person... That's just stupid...

Like, let's say you're playing Dungeons & Dragons with your friend over the weekend, where you're an elven warrior or whatever. But you can't compel your colleagues or the Starbucks clerk to treat you as an elven warrior next Monday when you go to work :D

the important thing is that it might not be a 'guy'. it would not be surprising that whoever is running the stream has serious internal gender identity conflicts/issues.

I have a friend who is going through this.

also, ironically, Starbucks makes it a point to ask for your name, or however you want to be called. you can tell them to call you Dark Moon or whatever. and workplace inclusion protips are also exactly about this topic, how to accommodate those who are different. small changes mean a lot to a lot of people. of course asking a whole team to WoW night elf cosplay with you every workday from 9 to 5 is not an easy ask, and it's reasonable to say no. where the line is unsurprisingly not an easy topic, but there are some usual minimum effort, like remembering the names of coworkers.

Respecting a person's choice of gender is not the same as respecting their insistence of "identifying" with a non-existent virtual animale waifu character. One is a person born into the weong body, the other is a bunch of pixels. One is in reality, the other is not...

It's concerning that this needs to be spelled out.

it's existing on the screen, where you can see it, and where people can interact with it. it has a voice, mannerisms, etc.

it's not that big of a mystery that the new possibilities that have been opened up by this new medium might lead some people to feel they belong more there than in meatspace.

it's seems like the virtual version of putting on a fursuit and going to a con. no one is forced to watch/listen/interact with her, but if they do it seems evident to use the requested pronouns, etc.

(and I'm not talking about this meta-discussion of whether Lina is animated by Marcan, but even in this case, to me it seems common sense courtesy to treat Lina as her; like a character in a book, who might have different intentions than the author.)

I'm not interacting with him, I was talking about him in a HackerNews comment. And this is not an otaku/furry/animewaifu/whatever forum, where the pecularities of these subcultures are expected to be followed. End of discussion from me.

It's no different than trying to unearth the identity of a random twitter or HN user. It's not about regarding them as a standalone entity; it's about not upheaving the psuedonymity that can be granting them their free expression.

I thought they were one and the same.

Blowing the cover on someone's online persona (And using the wrong pronouns for that persona's work) seems pretty rude to me

"Blowing the cover"

Lol. I just stated what's already out there. It's like "blowing the cover" on the voice actor of Spongebob Squarepants...

Not sure if you are speaking out of knowledge of this particular individual but with respect to other cultures, a biological male presenting as female does not necessarily mean trans the way western cultures think of it.

Japanese Okama culture, for instance, is an entirely different animal. I don't know this specific person just thought I'd share that misgendering isn't as black and white as even a lot of trans people think it is.

“she/her” on @lina@vt.social

Asahi Lina is widely believed to be a persona of Hector Martin (aka marcan) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35251905 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35238601 .

I never even thought about it before but you’ve convinced me.

I have my suspicions about that, but it doesn't change the way they choose to present.

uhh:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=LonzMviFCNs

Considering two of the first commenters in this gist are Kirby and a Dall-E anime girl, sounds like a spot on assessment.

Not that people should be shamed for their personal interests! Everyone should imbue some of their personal style in their work, that's how we generate creativity and so forth.

That being said, I think the problem is when personal style overlaps too much in what needs more professional separation and distancing. It seems like that can be a recipe for too much ego that creates rifts.

There is a risk that we start turning a serious endeavor into a personal project / hobby, or worse just treating it as a joke; leading to situations like:

  Up until recently, I was part of two private online discussion spaces where a bunch of Rust people hung out.

It can also be pretty off-putting for women to be honest. When someone's avatar is an AI-generated "waifu" picture with deep cleavage, I don't think it looks welcoming for the average female programmer...

It's not welcoming to this male programmer either.

Calling them female is much more off putting. Women is a word.

What do you mean? I thought these are synonyms. (English is not my native language though)

You said it correctly. "Average woman programmer" is un-idiomatic English.

> female, adj.; feminine; woman(ly); womanlike; womanish; effeminate. These adjectives all share the sense “of, relating to, or involving women.” Female is a neutral term usually used to indicate the sex of a person (or an animal or plant), in contrast with male <a female cadet> <my female coworkers>. Feminine typically refers to what are traditionally considered a woman’s favorable qualities <feminine grace>. Womanly often carries these positive connotations as well <womanly intuition>, but it’s also used to distinguish an adult female from a girl <her womanly figure>. (Woman is sometimes used attributively where female would be more natural <a woman lawyer>. These constructions are best avoided.)

Garner's Modern English Usage

are you talking about Asahi Lina?

No.

She's more of a "loli" character as far as I can tell. (Which can also be disturbing, but for different reasons.)

This... isn't just a Rust thing, it's very common in Linux circles as well. Where do you think the UnixPorn aesthetic of a certain type of background comes from? ;P

Note I'm not weighing in on the culture itself, because I don't care - I'm just noting it because it's kind of ridiculous to try and use it to dogpile onto the Rust ecosystem and what it's going through.

The Rust community I’m familiar with is basically like any other group of programming enthusiasts who want to talk about and work with a language.

Whatever is going on in Twitter land and with the drama around conferences and boards is a different world, but they aren’t necessarily one and the same.

I was gonna say, I experience this a lot. Most rust users I meet and see on HN are nice and welcoming.

But on twitter, it’s all tribalism and attacking other languages and other people. Gives a distorted figure of what the community really is.

I'm glad you stated this.

Oh that’s what was going on. I was curious but never enough to dig. That’s… interesting. Each to their own I guess

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26753812/

I guess if your passion is reverse engineering M1 macs and porting Linux to it, for free, there is a decent chance you are highly introverted and perhaps even a savant.

If you ask an average software engineer, or even a talented one to do it, most of them won't be able to crack the problem.

How does one patch KDE2 under FreeBSD?

I assume you're referring to Asahi Lina, who I believe presents as female.

The cartoon is female, but there's a guy behind, right?

Maybe it's a dog.

Does any of this change the results of the work?

If not, can you explain to me like I'm extremely stupid and need a very clear step by step connecting of the dots, why it even remotely matters in the slightest?

> Anime/furry culture has a significant overlap with the Rust community as far as I can tell as an outsider

Just look at the official and unofficial Rust servers on Discord.

The corporations are just waiting for the meat to be thrown their way.

> This is the kind of internecine conflict I should see in Anime discord servers, not about a language whose governance involves multiple major corporations!

I love this.

On one hand this is an indicator for our expectations. Adult stuff should be handled by adults, with wisdom and maturity.

On the other hand it is a sample of reality as it is (distinct from the shoulds we project) - no, corporations and adult organizations are not led/ruled by mature people, and not everyone acts wisely all of the time. This is the reality.

I like to believe that acknowledging that and creating organizations to be resilient in the context of immaturity, pettiness, confusion… humanity(!) is the way.

We do have some examples of nature leadership but these are the exceptions to the rule. People are people, let’s figure in their humanity.

So what I’m interested in are org structures supporting and correcting for fairness, wisdom, maturity.

There's a little bit of a "getting out at the right time so I can say I was there when it was good" vibe to it. As a total Rust outsider I can understand. Last time I tried to learn it, it seemed to prefer trading one set of problems ubiquitous to computing for a worse set unique to its niche. I don't know if people really like it or just want to be seen liking it, but I'd rather keep turning the wheel that makes Java code and have time for my other interests.

Rust is super amazing coming from C/C++/Python, but it's a bit meh coming from Scala. Of course no JVM, instant startup, small memory footprint, etc. etc. are nice, but also no JVM, no G1/Shenandoah/Z GC, no reflection, introspection, heapmap, etc. etc. :)

> Part of me is very disappointed in the enormous waste of time that is the “crablang” fork, and wishes the people involved could have engaged in a constructive manner instead.

Any group who decides to fork Rust probably isn't in a position of power to turn the whole Rust Project and Rust Foundation into something less messy. Without knowing any of the specifics about this "crablang" fork, creating a well-resourced, thoughtfully governed fork is often a pretty good solution to stewardship issues, and sometimes, new governance structures and procedures can even be ported back into the original project (see node.js vs io.js). Writing it off as "an enormous waste of time" where the people involved should have "engaged in a constructive manner instead" seems disingenuous.

Not that this is a core part of the post, and this doesn't detract from the overall message.

I am surprised how people pretend to be outraged over a fork of an open source language.

They are outraged by the fork because having a fork reach thousand stars so quickly made it harder to ignore the reality that people who love the language were fed up with the leadership.

Forking is the essence of open source software. Don't like something somebody else is doing with a software? It's open source, so you do it your way.

Also, please allow the crablang people to waste their time the way they want to. Some people watch Netflix, some people will create a fork and learn more about the project. They don't need anyone's permission or approval.

When does it change from time wasting to trolling? I've already seen people use it as a way to troll many rust devs sincs it was first created

I flicked through the GitHub and website.

Is crablang a fork of Rust? Is Rust a plant fungus?

Edit: yes and apparently yes.

They take great lengths not to name rust which is interesting for a fork.

I believe the fork was created in response to a draft of a new trademark policy released by the Rust Foundation which included some portions about where the word “rust” could be used, so they are going out of their way to avoid using the word in order to prove a point.

Forking is a huge resource sink, if it goes anywhere at all. It disrupts network effects that software benefits from. It is, if nothing else, leaving a local maximum of utility for everyone. In short, it's inconvenient, if not actually painful and heralds future inconvenience/pain. Anger may not be wise, depending on the specifics, but it should absolutely not be surprising.

Forking might be seen as a form of protest against the current leadership or their failure to address the needs and concerns of the community.

If the community does not agree with the leadership's actions (or failure to act) then a fork might be a possible road ahead.

Compare:

OpenOffice - LibreOffice

Jenkins - Hudson

MySQL - MariaDB

and many others.

Well yes, I assume this is basically a protest, but it's only effective as such because of all the pain stuff. If forks were easy, they wouldn't be notable, and the (threat of) willingness to endure pain is a strong signal of the pain a group is already suffering.

Anyway, "it's a protest" is pretty much sufficient in itself to answer the original question of why people might get angry about it. :P

Openwrt - LEDE, which got merged again into openwrt

No fork: No change.

Compare and contrast your opinion with EGCS

given the github repo says;

"now with 100% less bureaucracy!"

not sure they are trying to create a "well-resourced, thoughtfully governed fork"?

Maybe you're right, maybe a fork in and of itself could be productive but "crablang" specifically is a waste of time. I sort of interpreted the OP to be decrying the idea of a fork in general, but that might not have been the intention.

'I know nothing about the situation, but this comment about it seems disingenuous' is not a great reasoning strategy. It's not well-resourced, it's not thoughtfully governed, and it wasn't a stewardship issue. It was people believing YouTube disinformation about what a trademark is for and what it implies, and forking the project just so that the name and logo could be changed to one sans trademark.

As I said in https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=mort96#36107457, I interpreted the statement to be about forks in general, and responded to it as such; and I realize now that I probably misinterpreted the line. I don't know what to do, I wish that comment had more visibility but it's not highly upvoted and I can't amend my original comment.

FWIW, the trademark policy was incredibly clear in that it wanted to disallow any use of the word "rust" in reference to the language in project or domain names. I don't know if that would've been the legal effect or not, but that's what the policy stated, clear as day. That was the issue. But that's a separate discussion, I didn't actually intend to argue in favour of crablang itself being a productive use of time.

What happened with the trademark stuff? Has it been resolved? I can only seem to find info about the controversy, and not anything about what happened after.

I believe the only thing that has happened is they've said they'll come back with a new draft at some time in the future. Sage Griffin (communities advocate) tweeted[1] that the current status is that the policy is scrapped in a Twitter conversation, but I don't know if that has been officially communicated anywhere. It feels like it should have been.

[1] https://twitter.com/sgrif/status/1662970726423597057

When I say “I wish they could have (engaged in a more constructive way)” it’s an indictment of the lack of avenues through which one can constructively engage with the project.

I feel like the fork was exploitative, but I also feel like there isn’t a lot else they could’ve done, even if they wanted to. It’s sadness all around, right now.

Fasterthanlime is something like my spirit animal. Prolific and educational blogs that have challenged my knowledge with whimsy joy and catharsis. Also apparently emotionally intelligent and making the right moves here.

Sometimes it's better to drop out and start something new. An unofficial convention would be fantastic.

I'm sick of the clout chasing in these niche tech areas, it always drowns out the real passion and all the fun. The passion that fosters a healthy community and technological success.

Sometimes I wish a personality test was common for these ad hoc governance type positions (not just rust but with any OSS software). Not to exclude people but to decide if things are balanced. The people who want nothing to do with these systems often should be the ones figuring it out, but the people leaving trails of bodies behind them to plant their flag should be nowhere near them.

Thanks for sticking up for the people resigning and framing the bullshit in a realistic way. Also thanks for staying positive and I hope you keep blogging!

> Also apparently emotionally intelligent and making the right moves here.

One thing I really appreciate about Amos is that he spent a long time reflecting on the kind of person that he would like to be. If you look at his content from over 5 years ago, when he created his own programming language seemingly out of spite, you can see how much he has grown. It's very impressive and I wish him every success.

Ain't that the old problem, the ones who should be in those positions tend to run from them and those that shouldn't run towards those positions. I don't think it's a problem we're anywhere close to solving unfortunately. We just sort of assign someone who seems reluctant about it but won't run from the position, but in most cases we just let whoever asks first!

Might be interesting to make it completely democratic so less inside recruiting happens. Using ranked choice community wide voting with fill ins. Otherwise stuff might rot from the inside...

As it turns out, the qualities and skills that make someone an excellent systems programming language developer are completely orthogonal to the qualities and skills that make someone effective in governing a loose organization made up mostly of volunteers and subject to worldwide scrutiny.

There's a reason why most been around the block companies don't offer people leadership positions to technical experts.

Uh, at this point, just name them? What is this, Hollywood? Where everyone knows what's happening but doesn't say anything until a big scandal occurs and everyone piles on?

“I was able to reassure myself, by checking these private discussion places, that there were good people, fighting for the right thing to be done. That things weren’t irremediably broken. That there was hope for improvement in the near future.”

From the linked article, that probably makes it clear that they believe Rust Leadership screwed up, and probably represents why naming individuals might not be helpful, and could hurt the project even more than this episode already has.

The real question is what is the fix, and they need to implement it soon.

Naming individuals is the best solution because it will create the appropriate infighting to resolve the issue. It will be a huge mess, but it will come to resolution sooner.

The people who are "in" enough to participate in "infighting" likely already know who's being referred to. Naming and shaming would just bring fire down on them from the wider internet, which depending on the personalities of those involved may have the opposite of the desired effect.

I think you're underestimating the arbitrary cruelty of the internet. Naming people just paints a target on them.

Particularly with tech people who are well known to blow up and dox individuals and do even worse things based on a rumor, let alone someone who really knows confirming it. There are a lot of bad actors in tech who love doing that stuff when they get someone with a target placed on them.

I gess the point is not to blame whoever did this, but to change the system, so that no single person can have the authority to do something like this again.

Well, saying things like "I can tell you that all the good people who could’ve left haven’t yet, and that all the people who should’ve resigned, haven’t yet." does feel like there are fingers being pointed, but of course it's not clear who they are being pointed at. But I guess the people involved at least know who they are referring to, so at least that's good.

But let it be noted that "should've" != "bad/malicious" (at least, that would be my reading). Rather I think it's more about bad fit and incompetence in a specific responsibility.

Did they technically have the authority to do what they did this time?

Names would be named if that were really the problem. I don’t think it is. The common thread between this and the Foundation trademark drama is that the Project sucks at coordinating and communicating - they have been bigfooters late in the process and not servants earlier on.

I don't think enabling a witch hunt is the right play, but it is worth noting that the longer we go on with people who know what's going on behind the scenes not actually saying anything but overall alluding to it just adds fuel to the overall speculation fire.

Which is really all to say: fuck your concept of a weekend, the Rust ecosystem should've cut a response Friday night or Saturday.

> Part of me is very disappointed at ThePrimeagen, the Twitch streamer / YouTuber with whom I used to be friendly, for milking those controversies for every view and sub possible. For riling up the masses, adding fuel to the fire, creating the exact opposite of the climate we need to solve these issues.

Nah. Bureaucracies don't even try to solve these issues if there isn't a public backlash.

He also like just read the original blog post on stream, said a couple of things about it, mentioned that it's not good that this stuff is happening and moved on. Honestly I don't really see much milking there.

Yeah, seems a bit weird for me to see that there. I like both of these guys, but Primeagen seems to be attacked a bit out of the blue here. He’s reacting to this just like he’s reacting to literally anything else on his channel.

I also don’t think it’s been anything too bad, he’s said his opinion, just like the rest. He reacts to it with energy (and in an entertaining way, imo), and it’s impossible for him to not address these things as a live streamer. Ignoring it would be weird.

Agreed, and to add on to what you said - this whole thing is confusing so he is actually doing a service of trying to summarize all the context for people who don’t want to go reading a bunch of random articles or tweets.

Apparently they’ve talked: https://twitter.com/fasterthanlime/status/166296357643953766...

I see that he since edited out “riling up the masses”. The coward.

I think this Rust drama is way over-exaggerated. One community member made one decision for one conference which they probably thought wouldn't be a big deal (I understand now that it is, but to an outsider "keynote downgraded to regular presentation" don't seem like much). And now multiple people are leaving the Rust team, and some random commentators are "disgraced" by the Rust Project, and "threatening" to stop using Rust?

The best solution would be to just reverse the downgrade, and have ThePHD deliver the keynote. Send a strong message that there would be a major fallout had the Rust Project committed to their internally-made decision, but give them a chance to actually do the right thing. But that's presumably not happening, because ThePHD already left the presentation without giving them a chance to respond.

I also think the "Rust logo" controversy was over-exaggerated, since they didn't actually implement the copyright but only proposed to. And the entire mod team resigning made the mod team look bad, at least initially, because they didn't even really explain why.

The bright side of this over-reaction is that it's going to get some response from the Rust Project. Because apparently strong words are the only way to get a closed-door organization to respond appropriately. They'll post some sort of apology, and maybe it won't just be words, but they will actually become more transparent in a way that guarantees this will never happen again. Like how they all but walked back the copyright proposal and re-structured the core team following mod team resignation (or did they?).

But that's not an excuse. This sort of drama is toxic, I honestly think more toxic than the original action. Like, I feel bad for whoever made the anonymous decision to downgrade ThePHD's keynote, because even though it was wrong and hurtful, it doesn't deserve this level of vitriol. There needs to be better a way to get change than over-reacting to every mistake.

I really do hope the Rust project becomes more transparent, not only to prevent the situation from happening in the future, but the response. If everything has community input, when bad decisions happen the community can only blame themselves.

I have no knowledge beyond what's been on Hacker News today, but usually these blowups are over longstanding tensions, even though it looks like an overreaction on the surface.

Still, not doing anything and then suddenly blowing up isn't a good reaction.

> One community member made one decision for one conference which they probably thought wouldn't be a big deal (I understand now that it is, but to an outsider "keynote downgraded to regular presentation" don't seem like much).

One person should not have been able to reverse the decision that was made by a collective leadership vote. The fact that was allowed to happen is a failure of governance.

One of the people who left was the one who initially nominated ThePHD for the keynote. To have your nomination approved by a vote and then unilaterally overturned by someone working through backchannels would make me angry, too. If I was volunteering a bunch of time to a project that did that to me I might consider stepping down over it.

It's a bug. Bugs happen. Systems are still systems whether they deal with people or code.

When big bugs happen, we evaluate why, and improve the system so it performs better next time. We don't blame people, we focus on what allowed people to make bad decisions. In this case, it sounds like a bad decision making process that needs a patch.

Sure, but if you don't have authority to make the patch, and especially if this sort of thing has happened repeatedly--as the linked post suggests--sometimes it's easier and better for your sanity to just leave the system.

100%. That's why I ducked out of the boy scouts, why I ducked out of Amazon, why I ducked out of my abusive family.

Some things you do have to step away from.

Thank goodness you're here to tell us what literally no one thought about.

Other comments are calling for name and shame, or saying that groups cannot make decisions and there should be one authority.

So, while others may have thought the same as me, I am not reading a lot of comments that are in the tone of, "we're here now, how do we make the machine resilient so we never get here again."

It's a bug when it happens to good people who are both willing and able to improve the system.

When it happens to bullies, they consider themselves smugly successful and coast onwards to the next fiasco.

It's still a bug. You have to ask "why" more. Why did the system allow bullies to be leaders? What should be done to prevent that?

Part of the problem here is too much collective decision-making.

Sometimes it's much better to just assign someone responsibility for something. Then if they screw up, they can learn from it, or you give the job to someone else.

I think a lot of the issue here is due to the fact that there was seemingly a one week period between the decision being made and it actually being communicated.

And then, because no one has been given authority to make decisions and actually be a leader, then everything they say has to be in this weird passive voice like "It's been decided that.." which makes it sound like a conspiracy when it's really just a fear of delegation.

The ruling committee should nominate someone to do things, and then let them do it. They should never try to actually run things themselves, it's always a disaster.

If they can work out a proper apology and accountability, and restore the keynote, great. But the damage is done, and simply inviting the speaker back is not going to make amends.

> downgrade was not racially motivated, thankfully

Who would have suspected this was racially motivated?

Not to defend any actions by anyone, but a keynote is an unusual place to talk about experimental feature a language is considering (unless it's a small component of a bigger update/forecast). That said once the decision was made they should have gone through with it.

> who would have suspected this was racially motivated?

For the last several years, there are many people and groups who have gotten tremendous positive feedback from being a victim. So, many people would jump to this conclusion for outrage, sympathy, and signaling their virtue.

Thankfully, it seems it may be coming to an end now since it’s disruptive and at odds with reality.

> Thankfully, it seems it may be coming to an end now since it’s disruptive and at odds with reality.

I hope you are right. I'm less optimistic.

> there are many people and groups who have gotten tremendous positive feedback from being a victim.

Just making shit up to get mad about.

It's not that unusual. Herb Sutter's 2022 CppCon keynote was on a prototype redesign of the C++ syntax/language.

Cool, thanks to know there was precedence. I've never seen one, but to be fair I don't have a comprehensive experience seeing every keynote :)

My general feeling is that keynotes are for "setting the tone" of the conference/conference day.

Bigger conferences tend to put two particular keynote talks in. Something for people to discuss among themselves over the course of the conference, and then something to take away afterwards.

I watch a lot of conference videos, but I don't attend many conferences, I don't get value out of the so-called "Hallway track" and I dislike commercial air travel which limits where I could go anyway. I like where I live, that's why I bought it, so remaining here is great.

That's even one of a long series of such talks Herb has given, about features Herb thinks C++ should have, but it doesn't, and in all but one case those proposals Herb made were not adopted in the C++ standard.

If your language isn't intending to just remain stuck forever in its current state, a conference is a reasonable place to explain a proposed direction so that other people know where you think it should go. Not every talk has to be speculative, but a speculative keynote seems fine to me so long as it's obvious that we're not in an alternate dimension where this works in Rust already, which I see no sign JeanHyde was intending.

Yeah, and plenty of Python keynotes on umpteen projects to overcome the GIL - GIL that is still there.

If someone is in the minority, it's totally reasonable to ask, "could their minority status be a factor in their disenfranchisement?"

Then you look at the data, and in this case come to the conclusion, "no, it was not a factor."

That seems healthy and normal, it's not outrage bait to acknowledge that yes, sometimes minorities are at a disadvantage or are under represented.

It's just as fallacious to say "of course race was a factor" as it is to say "of course race was not a factor". Much better to ask openly, evaluate the data, and make an informed conclusion.

> sometimes minorities are at a disadvantage or are under represented

What does “under represented” mean, in a small, hopefully merit based, org?

Exactly what it says on the tin. Where do rustconf/rust lang leadership diverge from rust users. If 40% of rust devs are women, but only 10% of leadership is women, they are an under represented group in leadership.

There might be reasonable reasons! The existence of an under represented group isn't wrong, it's just a time to ask, "why is it this way?"

To be clear, I'm not saying there should be no under represented groups. But if there are, we should just be deliberate about understanding why. Are there systemic reasons where merit isn't being considered?

The rust leadership group is very small, so statistical representation isn’t really possible, other than luck. That’s just the reality of the maths. Do you think proportional representation should be forced?

> Do you think proportional representation should be forced?

What gives you the impression I would want that? I said, quite clearly, that deviations from the norm are worth asking questions about, but those deviations can be fine.

Do you think they should be forced?

I would in this case say: you look at the data, and realize you don’t know who made the decision or why, and have no evidence to come to any conclusion. All you know is that the disrespect is real.

> a keynote is an unusual place to talk about experimental feature a language is considering (unless it's a small component of a bigger update/forecast).

Quite the opposite, I believe. Since a keynote is seen by a dramatically larger slice of the audience, it's a good slot for talks meant to provoke thoughts and discussion, even if that discussion isn't necessarily one you agree with.

Seconded.

Rust is a great language with a good macro system that gets used more than it needs to than if it had a stronger type system.

To succeed at improving the language, contributors must strike a balance between approaching the PL research frontier while remaining a practical language.

ThePHD’s talk is a take on that trajectory that appears Pareto-optimal. It’s a really good subject for a keynote, I think.

"And most of the time, it turned out that the intentions were, in fact, good! But the execution was poor — or that there was a lack of resources, a lack of process, or a lack of manpower, or a deadline to hold, or it was just that person being that person again.

...

And it’s not like they’re really bad people, it’s more like they tend to… use back channels rather than follow process? Or they have too many responsibilities, and are unable to fulfill all of them properly? Or maybe they don’t listen enough?

Or maybe it’s not individuals, but pairs of individuals who have a feud for some reason or other (sometimes completely valid). Maybe one party feels slighted by something that happened years ago, maybe they have irreconcilable goals or technical views, or differing opinions on what belongs where."

The complaint has not been that they are bad people, it's that they are incompetent. This seems to confirm that some of the people involved are indeed incompetent.

This seems way more cut and dry than the author is portraying.

Kinda crazy that this was supposed to be a clean slate for Rust governance.

> Part of me is very disappointed at ThePrimeagen.. For riling up the masses, adding fuel to the fire, creating the exact opposite of the climate we need to solve these issues.

Isn't public controversy the exact atmosphere these blog posts and resignations, for lack of a better word -- drama, is meant to foment?

FTR I think Prime is just as wrong about this as anyone. The real issue was the issue re: trademark, etc. The real issue here is a failure of leadership. When you're in leadership and someone does something bad, why resign? Why not request an apology? When it's not given, why not build support for an apology? When an apology is again not forthcoming, you can publicly resign, but when you do, maybe some others will too, and you can say "10 of us signed a letter requesting an apology, including 3 members of his/her own team, and it was refused"?

Some technical people are unsurprisingly bad at leadership duties, and sometimes tactless, because these are difficult things, and we need to stop pretending they aren't.

There is no quick fix, but someone needs to do something other than just resign, because it's not leadership, and so far it's proven to do very little other than create more drama.

> It’s really more like those 4 or 5 persons. And it’s not like they’re really bad people, it’s more like they tend to… use back channels rather than follow process? Or they have too many responsibilities, and are unable to fulfill all of them properly? Or maybe they don’t listen enough?

If it's 4-5 people, it sounds more like there is a cultural problem that needs to be fixed, and if I were to guess that cultural problem is -- there perhaps need to be soft-technical PM-like, senior statesmen tracks. There needs to be someone not involved in the day to day who can listen, help settle disputes, smooth things over, and direct/focus teams, because it doesn't sound like these technical people are acting like leaders. And jerky behavior should have consequences.

When did programming, and the choice of implementation, become people's identities? These endless drama sagas just makes everyone look very childish, from the outside. I don't think we would see this in other engineering fields. Embarrassing.

It's amazing, isn't it? People care much more about seeing their favorite sports team win than about actually moving technology forward.

It's not JeanHeyd Meneide's (PhD) first time rage quitting. He has a history of this. He previously rage quitted from the C++ community and moved to the C community. I wonder where he's moving to next. https://youtu.be/vaLKm9FE8oo

So we should blame the victim?

"You run into assholes all day? you're the asshole" - Raylan Givens (Justified)

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

He wouldn't be the first person to pack up and go home because dealing with RMS is impossible.

Yeah, characterising that as rage quitting is disinformation. When an organisation clearly supports misconduct by an institutionally powerful figure it is correct to call into question whether the organisation itself should continue to receive support. I'm certainly never giving a cent to the FSF ever again.

creating extreme consequences for unethical behavior unrelated to the mission of the organization itself is problematic because we don't live in a universe where you can know things with 100% certainty.

in fact this whole rust fiasco is an even greater and more blindingly obvious example of causing massive organizational rupture over a minor accidental personal slight.

should there be more process in place for rust leadership? maybe, probably. But I will skip rust and learn zigg if I need to do something low level due to this disproportionate response. It's not appropriate.

Don't tolerate the intolerant, ironically.

It doesn't really matter if the ethical issues are tangential to the mission if the organisation can't disentangle itself from them. But in this case of the FSF the issues are not remotely tangential, they are deeply interfering with the mission. Almost all the leadership have been tainted by a clear refusal to put safeguards in place about leadership misconduct. It wouldn't be acceptable at a public corporation, and FSF claims to be a principle-driven organisation.

I don't see the rust situation as a massive rupture -- they did several things wrong and their process for handling it was clearly broken, and they will choose a new team who will have process and policy to the forefront of their considerations. Refusing to use rust because of some (so far, short term) management issues is an excessive response.

Who are you implying is the victim? The people who have to deal with rage quitters?

who actually perceives this situation this way? why would anyone perceive this situation this way, by default? this statement is needlessly inflammatory to a ridiculous degree—why would anyone assume overt anti-black bigotry as being the cause for any decision in any professional circle, in this year of our Lord Twenty Twenty-Three? why pour fuel on the fire like this?

this is yet another major red flag that indicates that I should stay far away from this "community"—there's clearly motivations and frames of thought at play here that don't mirror my perception of the real world in a very concerning way.

As an outsider, when I see drama in the Rust community, I always assume it has something to do with 2SLGBTQIA+ discrimination or racism. In this case, I was surprised when I skimmed the blog post to see none of that, although maybe I was missing some subtle subtext embedded in the pronoun usage or words like "discomfort." I can't follow this stuff anymore.

I’m with you, but have you not been around the last few years? American society is absolutely obsessed with white supremacy. This is true in the media, the highest levels of government, and in big tech.

I personally listened to paid guest lecturers tell me all white people are racist, and those who deny it are proving their racism. In my workplace.

People are brainwashed to believe and see this stuff at this point, and there is an industry monetizing it.

If the only tool you have is a hammer…

sure, and this is precisely why I left Redmond after 2016 and gave up on my lifelong dream of becoming a professional game developer—this poisonous culture was just too much for me to grapple with irl. at one convention, I directly experienced a white person apologizing to a black person for "being white". at the same convention, I went to a panel, given by a woman, with a black woman who I was seeing at the time, and when I asked her after the panel what she thought of it, her only thought was, "it was mostly white dudes in there." I packed my bags and moved away shortly thereafter—it was quite clear that staying immersed in this insanity any longer would have significant negative effects on my mental health.

the idea that any contemporary professional organization—but especially an overtly progressive-minded organization like the Rust Foundation—could even have the possibility of hiding secret undercover racist bigots deep within its leadership such as to make the above highlighted statement a necessary disclaimer (as opposed to a superfluous virtue-signal) is so far beyond insane that I don't even know where to begin.

What am I missing? The rust board, or whatever entity, booked a keynote and then unceremoniously canceled it, right? Poor diplomacy, but why is there so much chiming on and so many allusions of various -isms?

Go to HN page 2 and grep for Rust. More drama with the rust governance or something. They gave someone a professional honorific and took it back for unstated and less then satisfying reasons. The person it happened too seems to be a good enough person and some nice people left the rust org over it.

From the handful of things posted here to HN about the "developing issue", it looks like:

* Someone was invited to give a keynote; this was voted on at some point

* After the invitation was made and everything was done, some concerns were raised about the content of the talk -- apparently about whether the keynote slot would be seen as an endorsement of the technical contents by the Rust leadership.

* Someone in Rust leadership unilaterally asked for the talk to be downgraded from a keynote to a "normal talk", without telling anyone else or calling for another vote

* The invited speaker, recognizing something political going on, decided to "not play the game" and decided not to speak at all.

* One of the people who voted to invite said speaker to give a keynote, but never heard about the request to "downgrade", decided to resign.

As someone who is also involved in an open-source project with procedures and bylaws and such -- it seems like part of the issue has been certain people in the Rust leadership not being conscientious about following the process. I do believe that back-channel communication and coordination is necessary in real life. However, I also believe that confidence in the process itself is important. Having determined that something was necessary to be done, the person in question should have raised an official vote (perhaps talking to people individually beforehand); and having broken official procedures, that person should at very least apologize publicly for doing so, and perhaps be removed from a leadership role (at least for some period of time, maybe a year).

The author of this piece says people were "trying to do the right thing"; I mean, sure, we're all trying to do the right thing -- but when you screw up, you need to own it.

OSS is funny to me in some capacities. A marketed positive of OSS is "You can fork it and make your own changes!", and yet, when someone actually does this with a prolific project (Rust and Node.js are the big two that come to mind), they're met with "How dare they! This is exploitive and unproductive!"

I'm not sure what the solution is, or if there is one, but the prospect of forking a major project and being met with positivity seems to be pretty unproven.

It is ridiculous that ThePrimeagen has been called out (without whom I wouldn't have taken interest in learning Rust). He has been an avid supporter of Rust until the trademark fiasco broke out. No where did he "rile up the masses" or "added fuel to the fire". The trademark draft was really bad. End of story.

> Except, it’s never just that one person, you know? Otherwise I could burn myself by outing them, and do the whole community a favor. It’s really more like those 4 or 5 persons.

This is why I find it hypocritical. In the entire document there is no mention of even one person (or these group of insiders) who are creating these issues in the community. However, the one outsider who has been vocally supporting Rust (even made an entire Rust course on Frontend Masters) is being targeted.

Should tell you everything there is to tell about how the community has devolved.

Yeah, sometimes the fire is burning something which should be burnt, and "adding fuel to the fire" is the right thing to do. People are "adding fuel to the fire" regarding political decisions all the time, to get the masses engaged and make them pick a side.

And in the absence of a democratic process for decision-making, the only recourse we have, as people who depend on the projects governed by these groups, is to shout loudly enough to be noticed. If "throwing fuel at the fire" is what's needed to get enough people to engage to stop a really bad policy from going through, it's the right thing to do.

Pretty shitty move to single out ThePrimeagen. He has done more for the Rust community in raising awareness of bullshit and also educating people on the technical intricacies of Rust (much akin the Jon Gjengset videos) than a lot of these 'in' folks.

True only for people who "learn" by watching twitch. There are tons of articles on the intricacies of rust by people involved with rust development only they used words and are not so entertaining.

I wonder what he tries to achieve by calling him out. Seems like the only outcome is drama, and for what?

Yes, he called people out on 'generating drama' yet this is a drama generating move itself.

Yes, calling out someone for reporting on drama, as though the drama isn't a problem, it's your fault for gawking at it, is a strange choice. I think it's not unrelated to the ego-centric nature of these Rust drama events.

And he's being called out for a 3 minutes comment.

I've seen Taliban media with slightly more integrity than rust leadership.

There is obviously a lot of criticism justly being leveled at the poor quality of governance on Rust thus far, but I think a fair point I haven't seen raised is, what other languages lacking a corporate sponsor as the primary driver of governance have done better? (and why)

Python is the main example I can think of after graduating from governance via BDFL, but is there any other new language which has achieved the same level of popularity as Rust?

So far, most of the drama seems to have been tangential to actual language features, so they at least deserve some credit for keeping technical aspects of development mostly on track.

Elixir is pretty popular, and has been adopted by multi big companies. Yet from my experience it does not have any drama whatsoever.

Thresholds of complexity are much, much lower than is usually believed.

The original sin of C was to release an informal [under]specification. Kernighan and Ritchie failed, catastrophically, to foresee the phenomenon of management pressure to release/productionize software written by people who only half-knew the language. K&R C (or each of its de facto, platform-bound reference implementations) was at least simple enough to learn. None of its successors have been. Verifiable or maintainable software cannot be written in any language that is too complex to understand (or that is in any way underspecified). Verifiable or maintainable software cannot be written in any language that its developer has only half learned. And software that is not both verifiable and maintainable is worse than no software at all.

Oh come on already.

Start naming and shaming people, let the internet have its field day and let's all go home. We all know people will reconverge at one point anyway. We all also know that nobody will get harmed regardless of all the drama.

I expect much more from adult people. Go drink some tea and have a 3-hour walk with your dog or partner or a friend, deliberately don't touch the computer for 24h and let's see how differently you'll react.

Also, injecting identity politics in a programming language foundation has been a mistake from the get go. Sounds like opportunism.

My code of conduct would be "don't be an a-hole no matter what race or sexual orientation somebody has -- and anyone being a d-bag will get shown the door, no exceptions". That's plenty enough and most people out there have enough common sense to know what you mean when you say it.

Also can we recognize that forks of popular programming languages NEVER truly take off.

So yeah, take a few deep breaths, disengage for a while and you might be surprised of the different thoughts that come to you after.

Let's tone down the drama already, this already became super embarrassing for all parties.

> let the internet have its field day and let's all go home...We all also know that nobody will get harmed regardless of all the drama

It's easy to say this when one is not the target. I imagine it would be difficult to ignore doxing, death threats, swatting, and/or harassing of family and friends.

Fair enough, it's just that when I read some statistics it was something like only 0.3% of all physical threats have ever been followed up with something, and most of the times it was something like just following somebody with a car for a few days and then stop.

I get it, it can be extremely scary, I just don't think most internet warriors have what it takes to be actual criminals.

But I can also stand behind the idea that we shouldn't risk it, yeah.

these things keep happening and it shows a deeper problem with rust leadership and unaccountability.

Just like with the trademark policy fiasco just a month ago (which was also not the first Rust Drama), every community member - from speakers to organizers and regular language users - is confused, frustrated, feeling unappreciated with very slow official response and clarification.

I don't want witch hunting, I understand some of the people involved are volunteers, but if there is a drama every month, someone is doing something wrong and all we see from the outside is that someone acts shady and there is no consequences.

I'm not saying they are evil people, I don't hate anyone, I just think that they should do something else with their precious volunteer time.

It's not a witch hunt to show someone the door.

> Just like with the trademark policy fiasco just a month ago

I think those are different. Rust trademark policy is more a case of miscommunication, while this seems more deliberate.

Rust Foundation iirc made a draft statement but rather than saying "We'll take community feedback into consideration" went with a much more vague "We'll might take this into consideration". At least that's my impressions.

It was fairly bad trademark policy forbidding crates from using rust and cargo. `cargo x` 99% of the time was some cargo plugin.

Anyone who's written long contracts know you start with some boilerplate that contains a bunch of stuff and gradually whittle it down till it's just what you need.

The error they made was assuming people would understand that process.

It really seems from what I've read over time, there are a tight core oligarchy of 4 or 5 people who think they are the end all be all of decision making and everyone else be damned. They will defend each other against all outsiders. I've seen this on other committees, it's never pretty when it finally comes crashing down around their heads. I hope this doesn't continue to tarnish the reputation of rust as a great language to learn and expand upon.

I'm slightly on the side of JeanHeyd Meneide, on the other hand he strongly participated in cancelling Stallman:

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

The Rust situation seems to be instance the woke purging each other, Soviet style.

RMS has explicitly tried to claim the ability to veto group decisions within GNU affiliated projects in the past even though he never had that power implicitly nor explicitly in the past.

His cancellation has as much to do with pissing off so many of the people around him as anything else.

As an outsider with a professional interest in the language, it's hard (well, tiresome) to sift through the various committees and boards to identify the people who actually design and implement the language.

Is there a concise roadmap that's easy to share?

If there's one thing I've learned from most of this it's that paying attention to the people in charge is probably not worth the effort. They come and go, lots of drama, and insiders are reporting the ones who are there probably shouldn't be.

If someone resigns over this, then I would say that the right people are resigning. Very sad to see competence go but rage quit over this? Come on.

Come back tomorrow. Nothing has happened. Please!

I sense too much bureaucracy and micromanagement. I would typically expect that from 25+ year old languages. A technology as young as Rust shouldn't be riddled with drama.

I don't want to add to the drama here, but I would suggest to Amos to just say what you want to say. If saying it would burn you to the point you would have to leave the community, find a way to say what you need to say to address the situation that doesn't burn you out of the community. If there is absolutely no way to address the issue where you aren't chased out then take a hard look at your own communication style, talk it out with trusted people who can give you perspective, and finally take a hard look at whether this is even a community that is worth being a part of.

Don't post a bunch of emotional, vague, unclear semi-accusations against people you won't even name. This is just adding to a bunch of drama with no possibility of any positive outcome.

This does not help with evolving Rust forward with a robust ecosystem … something should be done …

As a complete outsider to Rust, all I can say is that the Rust community should use this recent "drama" as a stepping stone to figure out the leadership problems and move on with a much stronger determination in the future.

I totally understand that perhaps all of this is not that big of a deal at all considering that sites like Hacker News puts tens of thousands of eyeballs on you in a split second. But if there's something I've learned from these very sites is that Rust is a respected language and these kind of fallouts reek of issues that have nothing to do with the language itself but the people that are supposedly in positions of power.

This is the reason why we cannot take the Rust community seriously with these tantrums. We have given them enough time to get a grip on this nonsense and instead they are embarrassing themselves with pantomimes like this.

I had very high hopes on Rust, but it seems that they have to find another tiny first world issue to complain about and magnify it into a giant nothing.

Admittedly, this whole saga is more entertaining than the average pantomime but even that has its limits of banana slip-ups. There is a time where this 'entertainment' just turns into pure incompetence of this so-called community and its governance, which becomes very boring blazingly fast.

It is not as if the C++ standards committee, or Google (go) or Oracle (Java) are free from drama. It just tends to leak into public view less frequently.

I think that's the point. Drama in the C++ community is handled more professionally, in the Rust community it turns into temper tantrums.

>I think that's the point. Drama in the C++ community is handled more professionally,

I'm very skeptical of this based on what I hear of committee meetings. And committee members occasionally snipe at each other in public on /r/cpp.

C++ and Java are huge. Drama or no drama simply stops to matter at that size. These languages are here to stay.

Golang is also becoming rather big, although doesn't make a big deal out of it imho, as the community is barely ever evangelizing about it. And so far, the only actual drama I am aware of, was the telemetry stuff, and that resolved itself nicely.

> C++ and Java are huge. Drama or no drama simply stops to matter at that size. These languages are here to stay.

That makes zero sense. Drama does not simply stop because a language gets big enough. Some of Java's drama made it all the way to the Supreme Court.

Yeah, this whole drama feels so unnecessary and stupid. If you feel a burning need to create a huge drama clusterfuck, have it about some controversial change to the language, not about a single talk at a conference. This is just a fucking waste of time.

As a casual Rust user, the message that I get from this is that I should not spend time with the Rust community.

Then some ideas of the post went over your head. Whenever there are people there will be drama, and you wrong when you lump together ordinary contributors and drama queen. A community is not a hivemind.

There is no other language community that has such an extreme level of evangelists that loves to create tantrums and outrage over the smallest things and blow it up out of proportion more times than Rust.

We have given the Rust 'community' and governance plenty of time to grow up and be less infantile and it doesn't seem that they want to be taken seriously at all with this melodrama.

This is why I refuse to take Rust, Go, or Swift seriously. There are so many other languages out there that aren't insanely political with so many people's hands in it. There is no way good decisions can be made in an environment like that. Of course, the main advantage of joining the Rust cult is that the job market for "Rust programmers" is pretty well-defined, so labeling yourself as a "Rust programmer" will allow you to tap into those markets. But I'd argue those markets are pretty bad.

I've only seen the wars over when and if to adopt new C and C++ standards in the distant periphery, but it seems like any attempt to encode human interests and needs into systems through code brings about strife. The politics there might be less visible since it happens on mailing lists and old forums no one's ever heard of, but the only difference is visibility.

New languages will inevitably adopt the means of communication they grew up in. That's blogs and gists and tweets.

Yes of course C++ isn't any better. C is a weird one since it's the "original language", the base layer of abstraction so-to-speak so C89 is going to be the standard forever. The standards committee around that one has zero power (as far as I can tell).

What I'm comparing Rust/Swift/Go to are languages like MoonScript/Objective-C/Lua, where there is a single BDFL (Leafo/Steve Jobs/Roberto). I feel like for programming languages there should only be 1 or 2 developers, that way there is no conflict of interest or "creative differences"

Thats funny, because that same person we are talking about battled the C standard committee (with bureaucracy, not specific people) into accepting #embed : https://thephd.dev/finally-embed-in-c23

Wow nice post. Interesting lens into standards committee politics.

Also in my original comment I meant C99, not C89. Everything after C99 is kind of irrelevant. That's what makes C so cool. It's frozen in time, essentially. Can't be corrupted.

Wait what have Go and Swift done?

For Go I presume the telemetry situation?

Didn't they change Go telemetry to be opt-in before the functionality was even released? So they heard their users. I would say that's a good thing.

edit: Yep, they announced their intentions and after consulting the community, they changed it to be opt-in instead. https://github.com/golang/go/issues/58894

If you wanted to use any of these languages, you can do so without ever knowing that these kinds of behind-the-scenes drama is taking place.

I haven't heard anyone suggest that actual development of the named languages has suffered due to drama.

I love Go. I don't see any controversies surrounding Go. Or did I miss something?

Whole thing around generics where Pike and the community would attack the competence of anyone suggesting that go was lacking for not having them.

That left a bad bad taste in my mouth.

come to elixir. Everyone is focused on making the language and ecosystem awesome with no drama.

Do not come to Elixir. We care about people and intentions, those that don't aren't welcome.

Thats not very welcoming. technology is a tool and we all have the freedom to use it for what we want.

as someone who's been part of the elixir community and built his whole startup in elixir, I say if you're interested in building distributed realtime systems, join us. I dont care about your politics. If you want to contribute to the tech, come join us.

> Thats not very welcoming

The best way to create an environment that is actually unwelcoming is to openly invite people who don't care about others.

Possibly controversial take, but I don’t think it’s helpful to gossip about who the bad apples are. Either take a risk and name names, or wait until the dust settles.

Why does Rust drama pop up every once in awhile? Why are adults publishing soap opera drama on github? This is all for maintaining a programming language?

Nobody wants to name the one guy who Secret Hitler'd the keynote, but man let's name call a streamer unaffiliated with the project as soon as we can because he read the original blog post on stream and said 'this is bad'.

The cynic in me thinks that shot from fasterthanlime is more to do with ThePrimeagen being the new React Andy in the same content creation space as him, scooping up views/subscriptions.

Then tell the cynic in you that Prime and I are happily coexisting in the same space with different styles. I had issues with how he commented on the trademark stuff months ago, which resulted in harassment of friends of mine.

Things have gotten better since, Prime and I have talked yesterday and we’re good.

The rush is revealing. A rush to proclaim their friends are good people, a rush to run away from their friends, a rush to point fingers at people who are not their friends. Finally, rushing into Reddit and HN to damage control over the rush.

Out of all the things that could own a person and ruin their judgement, a toxic programming language committee ought to rank at the bottom.

Can someone do an eli5 please? I've read the statements of the people involved but hardly contextualized, how this is involving rust if so?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TB0cXGvuw9A

As a Gopher sometimes am always wondering what’s the big deal ?, like proposal rejecting is like a second nature, who want to talk about features about a particular language? esp a language like go ?, maybe because there’s too much “entitled” devs in the rust community ( tbh I wouldn’t be surprised ) well am always here with my popcorn for more drama

"even though it is VERY tempting to try and get involved with governance matters"

That voice in your head is you wanting to do the right thing.

In a false quarrel there is no true valour. (Benedick, Act 5 Scene 1) _Much Ado About Nothing_

Would be really good a change no the communication side. But I am without expectations side there where days without any explanation about why a draft for trademark pourposes was so bad.

Now working with Rust I have the same feelings as working with Java...

I can explain it for you: when you start writing a long complicated legal agreement, you never start from scratch. You almost always ask your lawyer to prepare the first draft and they take another agreement that's similar to the one you want and find-replace the names and modify a few parts of it. The early draft is never anything close to what you want and the hard work is hammering it into shape.

The document that they circulated was clearly a bunch of boilerplate. They assumed (wrongly) that the wider audience would have the same understanding and view of it that they did: that it was an early draft, subject to change. But the internet is not capable of such nuance.

I wonder whether there's a correlation between how much people care about somewhat small issues and the quality of Rust.

Although I think this saga is a bit too dramatic, maybe that's why Rust is such a great language: people care a lot.

Does anyone have a impartial summary about what this is about? I always hate when I'm late to drama and I have no idea what anyone is talking about.

Someone was invited to speak as a keynote speaker by the rust team. They worked with the Rust team on the presentation, and seem to have been actively encouraged to do so. Shortly after, they were told by the conference operator that they were being downgraded to a regular speaker, and they blogged their thoughts on why they were asked, and decided to (publicly) pull out of speaking at all. Then a member of the rust leadership team said that a subgroup of the leadership team made the call to remove the speaker from the keynote, and as such this member resigned.

That's my best attempt

Any committee of people usually means the worst of them - just like your HOA - the people who actually like doing this stuff of politicking and backstabbing are usually the worst people to lead.

Thank god we have a benevolent dictator for Linux and supporting actors (long may they live), really can't imagine the mess Linux it would have become if we had a committee.

Honestly this is a very bad look for both sides. But resigning over this tops everything. You don't resign at the first sign something is wrong, you try to help fix it. Sure if that doesn't work resign. No social environment is perfect and mistakes will always be made.

> you try to help fix it. Sure if that doesn't work resign

Why wouldn’t you generously assumed this is exactly what JT has done? Because from what I know, that’s exactly what JT has done.

Because no one is talking about that. So I'm assuming nothing, I'm simply using the information that I have. It is weird to not mention that.

> And it’s not like they’re really bad people, it’s more like they tend to… use back channels rather than follow process?

In Sebastian, FL, former public officials have been convicted and sentenced to incarceration time for doing this.

Time for a fork? "Rust without identity politics?" Require anonymity and disclaimers of any human presence (virtues or failings) in regards to the Project in order to become a contributor.

Call it "Dust". Mascot could be a crab louse.

https://github.com/crablang/crab

They already have crablang: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35592005

Good advertisement for crablang, didn't know it was a thing.

Sociologists in the future need to study the Rust project to understand what went wrong. I'm sure there are many lessons there.

It all started with programming socks.

Rust: Half the women, twice the mansplaining

In most non-profit organizations, in the absence(s) of leadership or courage, most of the time the more sociopathic, unreasonable, and stubborn people tend to glom onto power while the opposite move on.

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