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I recall the opposite, that the rust language (before the foundation) position was that being apolitical was a political stance. This is not the exact message I remember https://x.com/rustlang/status/1267519582505512960 and also can't realistically cover the entire community at large, as if that even has a single political stance.
For example, I remember talking that with you at the Rust Fest 2017, in Zurich actually, especially about the *very early version* of Async/Await.
It is ok for the community to move on different directions than the first one, and I don't blame any of you for that.
> It is ok for the community to move on different directions than the first one
I agree, I just disagree with your characterization of "the first one." There were differences between the original Rust and what shipped, but almost none of it has to do with what you've said. In 2012-2013, Rust very explicitly changed a lot across time, and now it certainly does not. Async/await drove a lot of that adoption. Rust was always "political", even before 2012.
"Non-political community" is an oxymoron, like "non-aquatic lake". Politics is the verb that communities do.
I think there is a reasonable argument that the default for a community with technical goals should be to accept social status quo conventions unless they conflict with the communities technical goals. But if the social default is "girls don't code and queers should hide" there is a reasonable counterargument that these conflict with the goal of making the technology (and community) available to everyone.
Queers should hide definitely isn't any social default unless the code is exclusively developed in Gaza. "Do what you like but please stick to technical considerations" isn't "you need to hide".
That doesn't mean that "Please stick to technical considerations" or quite simply "that's off-topic" are never valid. They very much are. It simply means that they don't provide some clean clear demarcation line around which to organize a technical community.
There's no single societal norm in worldwide source projects; that's just you monolithing a diverse set of groups. In this particular instance if you're just a GitHub handle then whether you're female or you wish to be called "her" then that doesn't require hiding that you're "queer", but it also doesn't require mentioning it. Just say, "actually it's 'she'" and you're done.
No it's not.
I'm an LGBT person with a trans partner and I find many codes of conduct to be chastising and purposefully finger pointing to conservative people.
A lot of them are basically, "your religious teachings or cultural upbringing aren't welcome here"
I don't agree with religious texts, but that's what you're wagging in their face with some of the CoCs.
Leave it at "don't be an asshole". It's that simple.
The current political climate, I feel, is a direct reaction to this.
A politically neutral space wouldn't permit religious people to harass trans or LGBT people, but it also wouldn't give anyone latitude to throw stones the other way either.
CoCs are "you're not welcome here at all".
Another thing: you always see language and project logos modified to bear the rainbow, trans, and BLM colors. You never see anything supporting Asians, white people, men, or Christians. If you did this, you would be called out as a racist. Which is so ironic.
Let's just get along and work together. Maybe we'll find more agreements amongst ourselves that way instead of trying to divide everyone into camps.
Some progressives are going to get very pissed off at this comment, but I grew up and live in the South. You can (and often must) work with people you don't agree with. It's not impossible to be friends either. You might wind up changing their mind, and they might wind up making you more tolerant as well.
No matter the person, it's really disappointing that we're still entrenched in the mentalities of tribalism, anti-intellectualism, "if you're not with us, you're against us", "an eye for an eye", "someone hurt me, so I'm going to hurt someone", and so on. And by "person", that includes me.
The Earth politics patch really can't come soon enough. How much do we pay the devs, again?
When saying these things out loud can be social suicide, well, it means a lot to see someone else say it first. So thanks. I hope tolerance can come back into fashion.
I've laid out a neutral response. Of course I have my personal beliefs, as one does, but I speak here without pretense. Believe what you will.
r/programminglanguages has the right idea: put a pride flag in the logo and a lot of these problems just sort themselves out.
the flag logo has proven surprisingly effective at weeding out bigots. Not just in this thread or the previous one, but also in the moderator mail: we've had at least several instances of mouth breathers writing rants along the lines of "How dare you use colors in your logo!" (that's a very nice "translation" of what's actually written in those cases). Similarly, several comments in this thread have been removed and their authors banned, due to comments that boil down to "I'm not a bigot, I just hate LGBTQ+ people". This will not change, based on the simple premise that such people aren't worth having around in any community, and these people don't contribute anything of value anyway.
And it does work out well, the discussions stay on topic, LGBTQ issues aren't really a community topic despite the flag. Here's how that works out in practice, from today:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/comments/1onr6...
Someone says "he", they're corrected with "she", and that's the end of it. In more toxic communities where people are encouraged to use whatever pronouns they want, that simple interaction because a whole thing, where eventually one person calls the other delusional, the other calls them a bigot, and then no one is talking about programming languages. It's an eternal struggle, and for many people who build and maintain programming languages, they prefer to kick out the bigot rather than be called delusional, so everyone can get back to talking about programming languages. Still, there are plenty of online spaces, especially language spaces, where LGBTQ people are made to feel excluded. People upset with the flag or pronouns can join one of those communities, and everyone is happy.
(If anyone is wondering what kind of comments, they're usually veiled or not so veiled threats along the lines of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45727677. If the mere presence of the flag keeps people like this out, that's fine by me.)
> Someone says "he", they're corrected with "she", and that's the end of it.
This is a good example of conversational flow in an environment where people are not reprimanded for referring to others with pronouns that accord to the speaker's personal worldview. One person says "he", another person says "she", and everyone tolerates this difference of expression whether they agree with it or not.
Essentially it's the most politically neutral stance on pronouns, as implemented in an everyday conversation.
(for the record I do realize the phrase 'politically neutral' is vague and unclear, and often used as a conservative dogwhistle, which is why I generally avoid it)
An example of the sort of Code of Conduct I personally feel is the most inclusive and 'politically neutral' in a non-scare-quotes-dogwhistle way is the Hacker News guidelines[0]. I think the moderation in general here does a good job of promoting open discussion across people from a wide variety of backgrounds.
I never mentioned codes of conduct in my comment.
Those are orthogonal to the observation that communities are fundamentally political.
> Leave it at "don't be an asshole". It's that simple.
Sure, and "don't be an asshole" is a political statement. The subjects and objects of that sentence are people and the intent is to affect how they interact.
If you feel that that's the kind of thing that community members should write down and say to each other, then you're implicitly agreeing with my claim that politics is what communities do.
I suspect you think you and I would disagree with what politics a community should espouse, but that's not my point at all. All I'm saying is that every community, every group of people coordinating together, is a political beast. It's true of an anarcho-syndalistic art collective from Portland who only communicate through crypto-signed commits on their self-hosted fork of Fossil, it's true of a gang of skinhead bikers meeting regularly at a dive bar, and it's true of the Rust community.
When people regularly interact with each other and communicate about how they should interact... they are politicking. "Politics" has become a bad word for some people, but it's the less bad word we have available to describe what it is people are doing when they are establishing the norms and practices of their regular repeated interactions.
Could you point out a code of conduct -- preferably from a large, well known project -- that reads this way in your opinion?
Life's for too short to force people to do this, and ideally we should make it as feasible as possible for as many people as possible to never have to do this.
Not quite your fault, but the framing of "people you don't agree with" juxtaposed with the implicit statement of "people who promote hate" (or similar) doesn't make for a clear discussion. To be clear, those two types are well separated. If someone is of the latter type, really truly they are, then they can be removed without further ado (and I think GP would agree). I think the situations that are less clear cut will make people in good faith fight.
I like some people. Everybody else I work with if they're willing to work with me. Saying that we all have to agree with each other is basically giving up on the political project entirely, and going back to strongman rulers who organize by demanding conformity. Very relevant in these times.
> we should make it as feasible as possible for as many people as possible to never have to do this.
No, we should make it impossible to avoid so people can't sneak into adulthood without being properly socialized.
What does this mean? Are you talking about people who openly support actual murder? Almost everyone is opposed to that, of course.
The best defense against polarization is a strong and cohesive middle ground.
If you pull to far in the other way, all the bonds break. And it's a race for each interest group to seize power, rather than having some intermediating force that serves as a buffer.
Again: look at the political climate. It's a reaction. The pendulum is swinging harder and harder because we've given up on the middle ground.
Most of the people you hate (and you do seem to dislike them at least a little bit) have honestly never had an LGBT friend. Imagine if they did how that might change them.
Instead they hear voices from the LGBT community that want to outlaw them and their way of life. That's pretty hostile. And definitely is going to be met with the same attitude you're giving them.
I'm LGBT and I have many conservative friends. They're more apt to come around to it than you believe. You're shutting down any conversation before it can even happen.
Oftentimes, the voices are outside.
I think you're somewhat optimistic, and "the middle ground" is not a magical place. It's easy to fall into a false sense of security that comes from making (likely valid) criticisms of caricatured groups. Middle ground should not be sought for its own sake, or else it becomes useless (akin to Goodhart's law; roughly "when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"). People should embrace a diversity of values, but the burden is to stay true to a set of values and push for the truth.
The fact that most well-known Rust crates are becoming huge bloat are becoming a problem to me, which is something that has been critized years again by the community itself.
As an example, I still do not understand why simple HTTP crates require more than 50 to 70 dependencies to execute a simple GET call...
Looking at ureq [0], for example, its direct non-build/non-dev dependencies are (counting duplicates):
- base64
- flate2 (4 transitive dependencies)
- log
- percent-encoding
- rustls (26 transitive dependencies)
- rustls-pki-types (1 transitive dependency)
- ureq-proto (7 transitive dependencies)
- utf-8
- webpki-roots (2 transitive dependencies)
The vast majority of the raw dependency count comes from Rustls and related crates, and I'd imagine reimplementing a TLS stack would be somewhat out of scope for an HTTP crate. I'm not sure there's much room for substantial reductions in dependency count otherwise.
Insisting that you should depend on code which itself has no dependencies is a bit hypocritical if you ask me. If you want a simple HTTP crate that doesn't have dependencies, you should follow your own philosophy of not using other crates and write it yourself.
This is what you get with package managers.
It's just it's not frequent.
There is very few things that need to be in the standard library. I only ever miss chrono or equivalent not being in std.
Then there are things like serialization and logging, which I like the idea of having promoted crates which are essentially just better advertised for newcomers. (Maybe included in the distribution already in some way).
To be clear, it's good. But there are mistakes that the Temporal project learned from and fixed.
(Temporal's single `Duration` type does have pros and cons, so I don't mean to frame having two distinct types as a strict negative. But it's very clunky.)
That made me chuckle because both are quite the behemoths, as I have previously said. If they promised this, it was a lie indeed.
Like you said, even Andrew Kelley said that Zig is a replacement for the C++. At the time. IIRC he kept going back and forth C and C++, although I may be wrong. I only remember him saying C++.
The person you're replying to.
>What does it mean to be "on the same side as Rust"?
There is a stated and auctioned stance the rust foundation poses, and they are saying they align with that. At this point if you can see their point the communication fault is yours.
>Being on a side suggests an unwillingness to part ways
No it doesn't.
>If Rust is a worthy rock in the political sphere for the moment
I have to assume their politics is more intimate to them than the maintainers of a programming language, and that they used it here because the conversation we are having is around rust.
You used "they" several times, so I took a certain usage to mean "Rust", and I was asking who specifically "Rust" entails. Who defines the "Rust beliefs"?
> > Being on a side suggests an unwillingness to part ways
"Suggests", as in, "it is likely implied that" (emphasis on "likely"), though I should've been more clear.
> I have to assume their politics is more intimate to them than the maintainers of a programming language, and that they used it here because the conversation we are having is around rust.
The primary topic is politics.
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I find issue with the framing of "taking sides". I hear it and think of fragmentation for the sake of fragmentation. There is a distinct difference in saying "I side with Rust" and "I agree with Rust", the latter being reducible to "Rust believes [a belief]" and "I believe [the same belief]". The former can be used to mean the latter, but I choose to focus on the likely implication.
I do like Rust, but I steer clear of the community because of this tithe-seeking nonsense.
Edit: come on don't downvote explain your reasoning.