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Comment by steveklabnik | Hacker News Reader

That's a bummer, because until then, you'll be strongly mis-representing Rust :/

I hope that you are mis-representing Rust. I'd be pretty discouraged if I was learning a new language and one of the first interactions I had with a notable community member was a notice of take-down containing neither encouragement nor constructive criticism.

Klabnik is a big voice in the Rust community. But regardless of how he might come across here; he is almost always positive and constructive when talking about the language.

For that matter: the constructive part was in the other post where he suggested some improvements. I can understand if the pull request is seen as aggressive, though.

To be clear: I spent about half an hour working on updating things for head Rust. But when a language changes as much as Rust does, at some point, if you haven't kept up with it, it's basically impossible to update, it's simply easier to nuke it and start all over. This is why we have always recommended that people use the nightlies rather than the releases, because even upgrading per-point release is quite difficult. Not only that, since it's unclear which version of Rust this even compiles with, it's not as if I could install an old Rust and submit particular, concrete improvements for a Rust of that vintage. Starting over from scratch _is_ a concrete improvement, because it's the actual best path to moving forward in this particular case.

Have I mentioned how much I can't wait until 1.0.0 actually ships?

I agree with you that this comment is quite harsh, but i'd like to point out that it's not a fair representation of steveklabnik's usual interaction with the community on reddit and IRC, as far as i can tell.

I'm quite happy to take PRs from an expert to address the issues and represent Rust better. :-)

UPDATE: I will point out that the README is pretty clear that this is rust 0.13. Doesn't mean it's a good representation of rust 0.13 either of course, but it clearly isn't based on a recent version of Rust.

Wait, you are being sarcastic, right? You know that you're replying to Steve Klabnik, who is on the Rust core team?

Yes, it was intended to be somewhat in jest. "The expert" was a subtle (perhaps too subtle) acknowledgement of his role. Although, I am serious that if somebody with better Rust chops than I wants to fixup the code so that it represents Rust better, then I AM quite happy to pull those in and improve the implementation.

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