They're asked to speak at RustConf after a leadership vote.
They've also written an article about reflection in Rust - a purely technical thing that is already pretty widely disliked conceptually. (EDIT: the talk was about this, but it's also compile time reflection and came with the usual disclaimer that it was not representative of any of the Rust team's viewpoints or support)
Rust members were "uncomfortable" with this purely technical viewpoint - not their behavior, personal beliefs, or even their demographic?
And then they pushed them out of the conference behind leadership's back?
Did I miss something? This is indeed really childish behavior.
EDIT: oh. It's not even reflection, it's compile time reflection. As in, it's not the next Java but instead something that might actually be very useful for the language if done correctly.
> The sudden reversal smacks of shadowy decisions that are non-transparent to normal contributors like myself. It is a brutal introduction to the way the Rust Project actually does business that is not covered by its publicly-available Procedures and Practices and absolutely not at all mentioned in its Code of Conduct.
Agreed. The Rust project needs to stamp this out before it begins to fester. This is incredibly stupid behavior coming from what is being regarded as the next C++.
Come on, Rust committee. Let's grow up here, shall we?
Much less weight should be given to someone "feeling uncomfortable"
Rust the language is pretty good but the community around it has become really off-putting. The thick veneer of empathy and compassion quickly devolves into "idiot compassion" and emotional blackmail. Even the linked post contains the following:
"I left because when I felt JeanHeyd's pain and disappointment at being mistreated and betrayed, my heart broke. I wept because of the cruelty. But I also wept because I helped create the system that could do this to someone."
I thought "rust culture" came out of this sort of super SJW/woke culture of mozilla? Nothing against that sort of mindset in theory, but it sometimes leads to a certain irrational hypersensitive intolerant mob behavior and authoritarian/anti democratic tendencies.
There was also the recent easily preventable drama [1] around the trademark guidelines some people left rust over. I don't really find any of this drama coming out of this culture very surprising. I write rust every day, I don't have to identify or interact with any sort of community around it, but I care about the future of it. I just hope it's already too big to fail at this point, because there is way more drama coming out of this community in the future, that's for certain.
Yeah I worry about this. There was no "C leadership", it was simple enough that dozens of people created their own compilers within a few years of C existing. this was back before the internet. they had companies sprouting up like Borland just making C compilers for personal home computers. C just ... spread. All these kids learning Arduino in school, they are learning C.
There basically is no other usable compiler than the official rust compiler. So it has this 'leadership' thing that ... C never really needed
Rust is winning market from C and C++ precisely because of strong technical leadership and direction. It couldn’t have made much progress by taking similar hands off approach as C, because C is already more than good enough C.
> Rust is winning market from C and C++ precisely because of strong technical leadership and direction.
No, Rust is winning because it is 40 years younger than C and 30 years younger than C++. Rust incorporates advances in computer language design that C/C++ cannot adopt without breaking backwards compatibility. Rust is winning despite its leadership rather than because of it.
In fairness, this reasoning would suggest that any new language developed 40 years younger than C and 30 years younger than C++, that incorporates advances in computer language design that C/C++ cannot adopt without breaking backwards compatibility would enjoy the same success, if not more, than Rust.
It seems likely that there are other important factors. It's debatable what they are, but clearly there is a difference of opinion about how much Rust's leadership accounts for why Rust is succeeding more than most.
These things can be true simultaneously. The Rust team can have extremely strong technical leadership and direction while also being incredibly immature when it comes to conflict resolution.
Conflict resolution is hard! I struggle with it as an engineer who wants to please everyone, but I also recognize that it isn't possible to.
Whoever had objections to the talk and was not able to express those objections to their teammates in the proper forum before taking action without their approval is just... immature. It violated trust amongst the Rust leadership team, and trust is everything.
It’s actually even worse, because this person also wielded enough power to represent Rust to RustConf, and did so incorrectly. They seem problematic.
Leading people is always messy and requires the maturity to deal with failures gracefully, and a catastrophic failure from a simple task is not confidence-inspiring. I love Rust, so I hope they get their shit together.
Rust is winning marketshare because it was built ground-up to take advantage of the massive progression of Moore's Law at compile time. Compiling programs written in Rust would have been completely infeasible 20 years ago, it would have simply been too slow.
What's your point? The target market of Julia is mostly scientific, not general purpose computing. That market is almost certain to have a smaller representation on HN. I'd actually contend that for a language with such a targeted to have 25 pages of results HN supports my point rather than debunks it.
Julia doesn't even operate in the same space as rust... Julia is closer to go lang than it is to rust and I wouldn't say those two languages are similar at all. Also if I were picking a language on community alone, I'd pick rust. The issues going on here are not reminiscent of the community at all. Julia also had drama over conferences and allowing members to speak...
Nope. Most languages have strong leadership and zero chance of taking anything from C/C++. And it will takes a very long time for Rust to get even 5% of the C/C++ market. There are more than 6 million C++ programmers out there. And new C++ projects are started every day.
Note that the "C committee" was actually the X3J11 committee of ANSI, the American National Standards Institute. In other words, it was just one committee within an organization with a long history of developing cross-industry standards. As such, their job in theory wasn't to invent new technology, but rather to adjudicate between technologies proposed and demonstrated by competing industry vendors.
Like many other modern languages, Rust is a mono-implementation, where the same organization is both developer and standards committee, while at the same time trying to fund itself (without revenue from either standards docs or the compiler) and balance external commercial and non-commercial interests.
There are advantages and disadvantages to each approach, but they are very, very different. (and in a world of cutting edge open-source compiler technology, I'm not sure the approach which resulted in ANSI C is even viable today)
Definitely not. C was born in a different context, and these days it's not common for any language to have multiple competing implementations, certainly not in its early years. C needed the standard because there were many implementations, JavaScript needed a standard because there were many implementations, but Python or C# or Rust or Java don't have a standard (although there are technical specifications of different degrees of rigor) because the standard is what the reference toolset does, modulo what are accepted as bugs by the technical team.
There was no "leadership team" for Rust at Mozilla as far as I know. It was originally a one-person side project like C++ or Python, then it was elevated to an official Mozilla internal project as its potential in the context Gecko was understood by the higher-ups. But again, as far as I know, whatever culture formed around the project did so organically, but also as a conscious attempt to avoid many cultural issues seen in other OS projects. And mark my words, the Rust community as a whole is genuinely friendly and welcoming compared to almost any other internet community of similar extent, and there's nothing sinister underlying that friendliness as far as I can see.
When Mozilla got rid of Rust, the leading technical contributors continued as they had always done (albeit now with considerably fewer full-time paid contributors), as an independent self-organizing entity, but now even less accountable – in regard to technical decisions – for any external stakeholders but the Rust community itself. But some organization was required to foster Rust's growth, to manage all the inconvenient legal things, the interaction with the now several large stakeholders and funders such as Google and Amazon, and so on. So the Rust Foundation was created to manage all that. But the foundation's jurisdiction ends where the technical aspect of Rust begins – all the technical teams are still exactly what they used to be, accountable only to the greater community.
At any point, anyone could have experimented with different implementations with no "committee" saying what to do, but let's face it: first, modern compilers, even simple ones, are extraordinarily complex compared to an early C compiler running on a PDP-11, and second, in light of the first, Rust didn't grow in popularity nearly fast enough for anyone else bothering to write an implementation to experiment on.
It just was a completely different era. There was no consept of what we today call open source, no compilers freely available over the internet, no internet to speak of for that matter, no cross-platform/multi-platform compilers to speak of, more platform diversity than now, FORTRAN was also a vastly smaller language so you could have implemented a compiler in a reasonable time if you didn't want to shell out $BIGBUCKS to buy one, optimizers (which are deep magic and really hard to write from scratch) weren't yet a thing, there were no standardization bodies that worked on programming languages, everything was vastly less connected than today. That obviously leads to redundant work.
No matter, the point is that nothing has ever stopped anyone from writing a competing Rust compiler, certainly not any imaginary "committee." Nothing except the fact that, besides mrustc, nobody has bothered because why would you do that?
Reminds me of The Tyranny of Structurelessness [0], even though there is a structure. My bet would be, no matter how smart you are, your ape genes have more to say than your brain. The rider (mind) and the elephant (emotions + brain stem)
110%. Any organization that lacks transparency in decision-making and accountability (that is, attribution of decisions to specific people) devolves into a shadow-hierarchy.
Which is even worse than an explicit hierarchy, because it provides more gray area for people with power to do things anonymously.
Also, lots of people high up in Rust have a background in JavaScript, where drama is common, which I believe has helped normalise it as a mode of social interaction.
Not sure there's a real connection between the languages at least when it comes to "drama". Especially considering JavaScript is the most used language, or at least in the top 5 at this rate due to how low the entry barrier is for serious use. So purely from numbers, there's bound to be a bunch with a background in JavaScript, as with any other new language. You could have also said the same thing about Python for the same reasons.
IMO the root actually comes from the very heavy social signals that were utilized by the Rust team early on (you can read a lot about them through the core team's reddit posts atp, especially under threads about the code of conduct). This effectively became a beacon for many people to gravitate towards. So when you see these sort of very dramatic disagreements that's laughable to anyone outside of that bubble, it's because that's the type of people Rust was (unintentionally or intentionally) beaconing.
Frankly, even though no one has asked for my opinion, the amount of effort people put into the code of conduct (and the discussion around it) is ridiculous; utterly ridiculous. In a time long ago, before everyone was incapable of compromising and cooperating with one another, we had two rules in an informal code of conduct for interacting with one another:
1. Be cool
2. Don't be an asshole
And then we all went back to trying to achieving the task at hand.
I've been involved with Software Development for over 20 years started with VB6 and some perl/python in 1998. I saw the "informal code of conduct" and it never worked. What really happened: many people were treating terribly and most of it was swept under the rug. CoC were created for valid and good reasons. I'm not defending the Rust community here, it seems childish to me. The past is not what you are trying to claim it was in this post. Look up the MANY Rails conference sexual harassment issues and worse.
We should not whitewash the past because the present isn't what we want.
I am an older geek. I never got the CoC against sexual harassments. It is f*cking illegal. Should be reported to the police and taken care of by the actual laws.
Coc seems like a law thing but who is enforcing it? Laws you have democratic elected people voting which laws, you have police checking if people follow them, courts giving out punishment. See they are 3 separate entities for a reason. Coc is written by the org, enforced by the org an punished by said org. Doesn't seem like an improvement.
Full disclosure, I usually do not involve myself with large groups -- so my views are likely to be a bit more innocent/naive.
The past that I lived in was comprised of people you personally knew; not anonymous membership in a large organization or group, where you could never hope to know everyone on a personal level.
There was very little opportunity for people to be unchecked dicks to one another, because you saw everyone consistently and could easily notice when something was going on.
Perhaps this is an unsolved issue about scaling human communities?
I do think this is kind of naive. If you consider something like a sexual assault, or even the more severe forms of harassment, that tends to happen among people who know each other, and people often don't talk about it after being victimized. So you not knowing those stories out of your tight knit community doesn't mean much -- if those stories exist you might need to have the parties involved trust you a lot to confide it, or you might need to really probe people about it.
You shouldn't need a giant, complex CoC to tell people engaging in sexual harassment and creepy behavior to leave. Which is usually the type of stuff people point to for why it's so important to spend thousands of hours debating the rules.
If I've learned anything for Reddit mod culture it's that when you see super involved rules on the sidebar it's still ultimately just post-defacto justifications for whatever emotional mood the mods are in that day. The longer the rules = a good measure how aggressively the mods gatekeeps their community for things that go well beyond the scope of what the community was originally about.
This is how things like Programming becoming lower priorities in such communities than personalities/views of the people running it.
more like "and now we have a CoC, so when anyone is even slightly grievanced, multiple careers will get torched (and not even always the party you'd expect)"
Instead of a tool to be used to solve problems local to an organization or an event, it's wielded as a bludgeon in always the most public way possible (either by the org/conference or target of the CoC itself) and time and again this has shown to be bad for everyone and an endless source of drama.
> Some people, naturally, feel that the norms spelled out in the rust CoC makes them feel excluded. To which all I can say is, yes, it's true: the rust CoC focuses on behaviour, not people, but if there's a person who cannot give up those behaviours, then implicitly it excludes such a person. If someone just can't get their work done effectively or can't enjoy themselves without stalking or harassing someone, or cracking a sexist or racist joke, or getting into a flame war, or insulting their colleagues, I suggest they go enjoy the numerous other totally viable language communities.
Hm... So, if someone just can't get their work done effectively or can't enjoy themselves without going behind the backs of the whole ostensibly “Leadership” group, what then? Has that person been ostracized yet? Have they even been named?!? (I sure ain't seen no sign of it.) If not, why not? There seems to be a hyuuuge amount of effort being expended to spare that person's feelings...
Which seems a) misdirected AF, and b) all too typical of these “governance by namby-pambyism” CoC committee organisations that everything on the Internet appears to have turned into in the last half-decade or so.
Excluding someone else from a group doesn’t make someone an asshole. Every group has one or some thing(s) that separate them from the rest, otherwise they’d never have formed a group. Maybe it’s a vision, or a goal, or a belief, but there’s something that holds the group together. Contrary to what you’re saying, it’s integral to the cohesion of that group to exclude people who will not fit well.
There are countless examples of this phenomenon throughout history. Take for instance, the formation of the USA, the Catholic Church (Great Schism, Protestant Revolution, etc.), the American Civil War, etc. On a smaller scale, I know I’ve worked with people who would be a good fit on one team, but don’t match the culture of another. Or people who are very passionate about something, but wouldn’t do well in a group focused on something else. Sometimes, even, people have the same ends and such different means that they cannot coexist in the same group. You can see this with sports teams; everyone wants to win games, and some players or coaches don’t fit on certain teams because their idea of how to win doesn’t align with others’.
The reality is not everyone fits into every group. Trying to force that will yield a lot of resentment on both sides, in my experience. Much better to nip the problem in the bud.
I think in my past, whenever I've been in a leadership position over a group of people, we've all been there to achieve some goal. We were all cooperating to reach the same end -- and those with a different opinion of that "end" were excluded.
I have also been on the opposite side of this: I've been a member of groups whose goals I did not agree with. And no amount of civility or communication would bridge that chasm; therefore my opinions and thoughts were excluded (and I voluntarily left).
There is no right or wrong here -- if I step back and stop injecting my own feelings into the conversation: there are just differences.
I don't like theories. I don't like abstract things that try to become a source of truth, while completely ignoring and marginalizing the very real human element involved. I have no respect for them.
In my view, "don't be an asshole" is basically: you join a group of people, do not carelessly or intentionally go against the norms of that group. Do not insert yourself into a group of people that you know you will not get along with. There is no right or wrong, but there is conflict and no conflict.
But even now, as much as I have tried to take a step back with an objective lens, and disassociate from my very real thoughts, feelings, and beliefs: what is the point? I hold all of these because they are integral to who I am. As do the people of the Rust community.
Disjointed thoughts, without a goal to neatly encapsulate them all. Or perhaps my goal was to share my human experience with others? To socialize and create bonds with others? Quite a silly thing to do on the internet.
>We were all cooperating to reach the same end -- and those with a different opinion of that "end" were excluded.
If you mean those with a different opinion about the overall "end" of the project, this would make sense.
If you mean those with different opinions about any part of it, like how the project should implement reflection for example, it makes absolutely no sense to exclude them.
This would translate into an authoritative culture, where everything is predetermined, and no dialogue is allowed, except perhaps for trivial matters.
Have you remarked how few software projects, even big and visible, handle privacy well, especially if you consider things like stalking? And then what happens to the people that come talk about it in these groups?
The people are pushed out because "their concerns are not something this project is about". Which is consensus and focused on getting results right?
> I have also been on the opposite side of this: I've been a member of groups whose goals I did not agree with. And no amount of civility or communication would bridge that chasm; therefore my opinions and thoughts were excluded (and I voluntarily left).
What if you couldn’t leave? Perhaps the cost of leaving is too high, or you’re required to for a job. Membership in many groups isn’t even a direct action, it’s a by product of some other action. Take functional programming, I love it, but holy fuck I should have known as soon as I saw the word “pure” there’d be fucking Nazis, xenophobes, and bigots.
> Do not insert yourself into a group of people that you know you will not get along with. There is no right or wrong, but there is conflict and no conflict.
Take my functional programming example: I have caused and will cause conflict. Because sometimes “not being an asshole” is actually being an asshole. Life’s full of color like that, you know?
Seriously? You encountered Nazis in functional programming fora? Like, more than in your typical programming fora? (Any at all is more than I've met, but then I never socialize much.)
Your assumptions about micro-aggressions existing are wrong. "Don't be an asshole" is (or should be) about how you act towards others not how others perceive your actions. If someone wants to be offended, that's them not being cool.
That's not my understanding of micro-aggressions [1]. IIUC, inadvertently doing a micro-aggression isn't being an asshole, but persisting in it after it has been pointed out definitely is.
[1]: Disclosure: I'm a minority (disabled), but I'm also a white man.
The funny thing is the typical response to basic drama is aggressive moderation/oversight, which often generates as much or more drama than before.
Online communities have a natural tendency to turn inward and become disconnected from the original purpose of the community. A good measure is how much meta/political stuff comes up in every thread.
Just because someone doesn't deserve something based on merit, doesn't mean they won't be resentful and vindictive if they don't get it. You could even say the concept of merit and the reality of differentiation of competence and ability itself leads to drama and conflict.
Pretty much every human community has to be to some extent, with the exception of communities that face no external competition. Non-meritorious communities subject to competition quickly disappear.
“…to some extent…” is, i think, the most important piece of your reply.
sure, merit plays some kind of role, but so do many other things. what so many comments in this discussion (and every other discussion surrounding this issue over and over and over again ad nauseum) really seem to want to ignore is the many other factors that play into long term group/project success.
Once you understand that "woke" is basically a kind of white internecine competition then it stops being surprising that the "woke" movement doesn't really care about non-white persons except as pieces in that game. These events are of course entirely consistent with that interpretation, and so far I've never seen it falsified.
this whole "woke" mentality is going out of hand too fast...
I mean, someone bullying some veterans/old men because they're "woke and feminist" isn't going to earn any sympathy from me.
nowadays... "woke" just means "I'm better than you (so I can/will do things that are otherwise unacceptable to you)"
...I think we chose the wrong word. Rather than "woke", it should have been "NO BULLYING" -- which includes all things the real "woke" people tried to do, and forbids all things the wrong "woke" people are trying to do
It definitely strikes me as thought-terminating cliche. If people were calling themselves woke maybe, but I've only seen it as pejorative for several years.
I don't think it's fair to entirely dismiss either, there really is a lot of incredibly toxic behaviour in communities labelled "woke" (and agreeing with further up the chain, I can't help but feel being a bit less "inclusive" and demanding some commitment to the product might help, gatekeeping be damned). But we should strive to accurately describe what those behaviours are.
> Nothing against that sort of mindset in theory, but it sometimes leads to a certain irrational hypersensitive intolerant mob behavior and authoritarian/anti democratic tendencies.
Really? Nothing against a thing that leads to hypersensitive intolerant mob behavior and authoritarian/anti democratic tendencies!?
I did. I don’t get why they wouldn’t be against the theory of something so obviously flawed that leads to exactly what they are describing.
It’s like saying you have nothing against eugenics in theory, but the leap to how that can go wrong in practice is painfully obvious.
Or “I have nothing against giving everyone a million dollars in theory”. Obviously that is a dumb idea, so why even say you have nothing against it “in theory”.
well its a difficult terminology to use because the right/conservative people are of course also against sjw/woke ideology. The distinction is that I'm criticizing very specific tendencies of some people whom could be best described as woke, not the underlying ideology. Such as when they weaponize privilege, language, race or sexuality in order to achieve some secondary unrelated or overarching goal. It's "the ends justify all means" mentality, if by democratic process you won't achieve consensus that agrees with your personal particular set of beliefs, then the rejection, destruction and undermining of collective decision making processes is justified. Which ignores the original reasons for why democratic structures exist in the first place (such as term limits and adversarial structures vs. corruption and abuse of power). This is essentially my criticism of some woke people.
It is very difficult to use the terminology even though it is the most accurate, because conservatives are the most loud adversaries of it, but they are just hateful racists, bigots, ableists, sexists, transphobes, homophobes, islamophobes, xenophobes, etc. Which of course invalidates everything they ever say.
> It is very difficult to use the terminology even though it is the most accurate, because conservatives are the most loud adversaries of it, but they are just hateful racists, bigots, ableists, sexists, transphobes, homophobes, islamophobes, xenophobes, etc. Which of course invalidates everything they ever say.
Perhaps you should re-evaluate these assumptions and actually listen to people before you dismiss them.
I think it parallels the Christian Crusades where crusaders believed they had a moral duty to reclaim the holy land and convert people to Christianity, causing enormous damage in the process. Similarly, the Rust™ ecosystem largely believes they have a moral imperative to replace all software for the cause of memory safety.
Much like priests hidden away in their sacristies, the Rust™ community meets my criticisms with the silence of a prayerful vigil, retreating to the cowardly sanctuary of downvotes instead of engaging in the enlightening pursuit of reasoned dialogue. [1][2][3][4]
As much as I found this funny and insightful, I think that you misrepresent the crusades (and perhaps, by extension, Rust). In my partially-informed opinion, conversion wasn't a major goal, even though people in conquered lands were given the option to convert and integrate. It was more important to claim "holy" land for Christians and make a show of owning and controlling the significant territory.
Whether or not Rustaceans want to banish C people to the desert to write printer drivers or to commit apostasy and assimilate I am not qualified to say.
>I think it parallels the Christian Crusades where crusaders believed they had a moral duty to reclaim the holy land and convert people to Christianity, causing enormous damage in the process
Perhaps those crusaders have also witnessed several centuries of islamic invasions of said lands, and countries all around the general area, and the takeover by force of the local populations...
I’m pretty sure that “think of the children” is a position taken at least as often by people who describe themselves as anti-woke, such as DeSantis and his “saying gay is illegal” idiocy.
The term at this point is so twisted that your question is like asking if there a similarly succinct word one can use for the N word. Looking for an alternative that means the same thing is incompatible with it being inoffensive
It looks like your comment may have been removed(?), but I thought its last sentence or two was recommending that the parent poster search their vocabulary for something less laden with negative connotation. Based on this, I was hoping you'd have a suggestion.
I think your analogy to the "N word" makes it difficult to assume good faith, but if it were possible to do so regarding "woke," is there a way to refer to that idea without being offensive?
Perhaps just "progressive" or "left-leaning" would suffice, but my impression is that "woke" usually refers to a more extreme form that is focused on social issues. "SJW" also seems to have a negative connotation.
> It looks like your comment may have been removed(?)
You can enable showdead in your profile settings (click on your username) to view [dead] comments. With enough karma you can also vouch for them which might result in the comment being revived.
While terse, “woke” is not succinct, in its current negative external use, because it doesn’t clearly communicate anything about what it describes other than that it is disliked by the speaker. It communicates more about the speaker and the identity group they affiliate with than its notional referent; its a kind of right wing virtue signalling. (The older positive use at least had something like a coherent meaning, so arguably was succinct as well as terse.)
I hadn't realized there was a meaningful difference between "terse" and "succinct" except for the negative connotation of the first. A few dictionaries and thesauruses seem to suggest I'm not too far off, and hopefully you'd agree that one wouldn't ask for a negatively laden replacement for a word that was being discussed as being negatively laden.
It sounds like you don't think "woke" means anything and is therefore not worth replacing. Is that more or less correct?
My recollection was that the parent comment I was responding to recommended that its parent replace the word to avoid immediately having the appearance of bad faith, which is why I was asking about their suggestion for a replacement. It seemed like they might have something in mind.
It's also a relatively apt description of a small subset of left-wing groups. My assumption is that the parent comment is explicitly referring to this small subset.
Similarly "white supremacist" is often used as an insult on the inverse side, even for groups that don't believe in or desire white dominance. If someone actually does believe in those things, though, it's still a totally fine term to describe them.
> I thought "rust culture" came out of this sort of super SJW/woke culture of mozilla? Nothing against that sort of mindset in theory, but it sometimes leads to a certain irrational hypersensitive intolerant mob behavior and authoritarian/anti democratic tendencies.
I'm not sure what SJW or "woke" means in this context. They cancelled a black man because they felt "discomfort" over him being the keynote speaker.
This whole exchange feels off. Essentially, the underlying spat is over a strong technical disagreement, but it is being prosecuted in this weirdly stylized language of emotion and abuse. I have no idea how something like this can be overcome so long as the core Rust community feels this is an acceptable way to handle things. Clearly this is something which extends beyond the immediate leadership team.
The problem is that the strong technical disagreement was not brought up the many times it could have! Instead the stick was stuck in the bike wheels way after the bike was moving forward at a decent speed.
Though “downgrading keynote to talk” is obviously not the same as an outright disinvite, the fact that the original invitee asked explicitly about this content being pre-RFC (giving rust leadership the out to resolve this amicably!), just makes it hard for me to say “oh this makes sense”.
Perhaps this is inevitable in some sense if the critique is not brought up earlier. But it’s something that feels really avoidable if people were more honest about their own feelings on other peoples work.
What I don't get here is the following. No matter how egalitarian you organize such a conference, doesn't it make sense that the organizers get the last say in what the keynote looks like? They have an rough overview over all contributions and they can decide if what you contribute is best suited to be a keynote.
Of course that gives them a certain level of power of the discourse, but what is the alternative? Community-voted conference structures that fail to take many variables into account that you need to take into account for an enjoyable conference?
If I were invited as a keynote speaker and the conference organizers tell me that the stuff I produced is good, but not suitable for the keynote I wouldn't blame them, but myself. The only instance I could imagine was if they invited me specifically for a spicy topic and my talk was too spicy for them. But a tech talk? Come on.
In this specific instance, there was a vote to have this keynote. Then somebody seems to have circumvented this process to get the keynote downgraded (leading to the OP resigning, as they had been behind the initial vote!)
There was somebody who circumvented the intended governance structures to make this happen, and this is probably where the frustration and this blog post come from.
Okay that is a tad bit more problematic, but I still think it is not that dramatic of a thing, especially without hearing the reasoning of the organizers.
They could (or should) have been more transparent with communicating their reasoning, but again: Anyone who has ever organized any decently sized event knows that in the end the buck will stop with whoever has to do the actual work. And if you ask me (you probably didn't), giving organizers that power and trust is generally reasonable. They have the best insight, they have to carry the consequences if it does not work out, etc.
Of course that trust can be lost and a community can decide to let other people organize their event next time. But the way I see it those made responsible for an event should be able to shape that event.
> but I still think it is not that dramatic of a thing, especially without hearing the reasoning of the organizers.
You still seem to be missing the point: Which “organizers”? The ostensible “Leadership” of the project – which one would think should be the final arbiters of any such organizing – did want the guy to do the keynote. The real issue here is that the stewardship of the whole project, to put it in sophisticated technical terms, sucks if some grey eminence can undermine the official leadership just like that. Then their whole code-of-conduct, leadership-by-committee, woke-and-adapted-for-Modern-Audiences governance foofarah is just flim-flam, a sham, a lie.
> I have no idea how something like this can be overcome so long as the core Rust community feels this is an acceptable way to handle things. Clearly this is something which extends beyond the immediate leadership team.
Do the Rust community really feel this is acceptable?
Everyone seems to hate it, so I can see that it's possible it's "just" bad leadership (which is a big deal of course).
We've deprived a whole generation of the rhetorical tools for healthy, impersonal and professional argument. It's no wonder that they've pressed this "stylized language of emotion and abuse" into service to fill the void: it's all they know.
But still, they did create (and sometimes even use) tools that at least make it possible – tools which far too many members of the youngest generations, and their organisations, seem to have abandoned or never even knew they existed in the first place.
The lack of emotional (and explicitly confrontational) experiences in modern society are underdeveloping skills to deal with them.
Consequently, you get childish spats over what should be a technical disagreement, because people aren't comfortable saying "I think you're wrong, but I respect your opinion. Here are the reasons I think you're wrong..."
As the quip goes, anonymity and the lack of physical presence turns everyone into an asshole on the internet -- and then we raised most of the world on the internet.
Critical thinking skills independently from the subjects they may arise from. It’s not a trendy topic of argument, but I will also propose that modern English speakers have no notion of their own language without a prerequisite in Latin, or you get folks like the person trying to tell me my subscription date started at some arbitrary date unrelated to the specific date I signed under.
> I will also propose that modern English speakers have no notion of their own language without a prerequisite in Latin.
1. English is a Germanic language, not a Romance one.
2. Even for speakers of Romance languages, knowledge of the ancestor language doesn't really make a difference. Does it help a modern English speaker to know that silly once meant "blessed by God"?
3. The notion that Latin is somehow more logical than English is a pervasive one, but it has absolutely no evidentiary underpinning. It's pure classist bullshit.
That's not even the context we're talking about here. We're talking about professional argument. Disagreement over decisions. Hurling slurs at people isn't even in the orbit of that.
I'm talking about people being thin-skinned, petty and passive-aggressive about other people disagreeing with their ideas, which is something I see _constantly_ in this field.
It's much worse when the progress we've made is weaponized against people and minor technical/procedural disagreements get turned into "other person hates X" because they disagree with me and I'm X...which unfortunately happens sometimes (and mirrors the false-equivalency that you've presented here).
Previous recent generations also had most nations sending large groups of their men off to kill other nations' men for insufficient reasons.
As a result of the current geopolitics, we don't have the self-awareness to realize that minor conflicts are minor conflicts and that the absolute best place to be and thing to be doing is spending time at home with your loved ones.
We certainly shouldn't be carrying out PR strategy wars against our colleagues like is happening here...
War and nationalism haven’t ceased, nor have the emotional levers you speak of gone away, what has happened is that folks are comfortable behaving differently online than they would face to face
If he did the talk. If he did it as a keynote. If someone else is “leaving rust” because of it?
It all seems so fabulously irrelevant, I really struggle to understand why:
1) I should care (I don’t, currently)
2) People are coming out of the woodwork to criticise the rust team / foundation whatever when they’re not involved.
3) Why people having emotions (eg. The person above, who does care) is somehow a bad thing?
4) Any kind of positive out come is going to come of this.
I really struggle to view doing anything else as not hostile to the rust project or having an agenda (“stop rust being woke!!”) which is non technical, and unhelpful.
Rust is great. It’s not perfect. The people who build it are not perfect, the foundation is not perfect.
People are not perfect.
It’s ok.
Call out problematic behaviour, don’t obsess over it.
From my understanding the Rust team was involved and they sidestepped democratic processes put in place to make sure the Rust foundation doesn't kill itself with unchecked mismanagement essentially.
The point is more that this sort of unilateral decision should never have been possible to make in the first place. It should have been discussed and voted on before the talk was downgraded.
Perhaps that specific incident is inconsequential, sure. I think even the speaker agrees so. But the fact that this lapse in process could happen within the Rust foundation at all is a red flag for other, more language-specific dangers.
I mean, I hear you. I understand what you're saying, I just don't understand how you (or others) think this is related to the technical aspects of the language.
But the RFCs are written and reviewed by people. And they need to have the feeling that the work they do isn't useless because the one who actually decides is somebody else who hasn't been involved in the process at all until the very end. It's ok having somebody being able to veto stuff, but this must be known and communicated beforehand - "yes, that's ok for us, but $PERSON has the last word on this so we have to await his approval".
Because the same people are involved, and they knowingly sidestepped these exact sorts of processes without care. It might not be important to you, but this seems like a red flag to many.
If leadership acts so carelessly with regard to matters concerning a human being in such a shady and disrespecting manner, why would they act less careless with regard to technical matters? Will they just enforce their biased opinion, ignoring valid and generally accepted technical arguments? Rust leadership sounds a bit like the elite leadership of a communist state. I'd prefer an open dictatorship over that.
Notable in this backlash that this happened Friday evening/Saturday morning. So many of whom you’re characterising as the “elite leadership of a communist state” might not have seen this yet. They need to coordinate, build consensus and speak with one voice. I expect that might take a couple of days so they might have a response by Wednesday or so.
Also, my understanding is that the consensus among the committee was to invite and then one person broke that consensus. You’re characterising this as a careful, considered decision made by all of Rust project leadership but that might not be the case at all.
No, I am not presenting this as a careful, considered decision. I was just responding why this incident could possibly also reflect on technical matters (not saying that it actually does). I have no clue what went on exactly. But clearly leadership somehow failed in this incident. Looking forward to hear more about how exactly this has happened.
It’s possible to characterise anything as a leadership failure because the buck stops with them. But I don’t see what they could have done differently other than all being available on weekends to troubleshoot issues like this.
If just one person inside leadership fails, that's also leadership failure. If that's the case, most likely the remaining leadership will distance itself from this soon enough.
I’m less interested in collective blame/punishment and more about “how do we prevent this from reoccurring?”
I’m not seeing any obvious solution. If one member of the leadership team does something stupid on a Friday, it can only be resolved by Tuesday or Wednesday. Folks are going to pick up their pitchforks on Sunday and say that “leadership failed”. Sure. But I don’t see a way around this.
You must be fun at incident review. "The solution is to hire better engineers. Our root cause analysis shows that this should have never happened in the first place. Whoever is responsible for this needs to go."
You’re missing the distinction here between incompetence and malice. One member of leadership acted maliciously; the fact that they were successful indicates that leadership as a whole was missing some controls (formal or otherwise). The latter party is analogous to whichever engineer accidentally brought down prod, whom our post-mortems should not blame—but the former is not.
If some dirtbag got angry about being passed over for a promotion, got offers for a new gig, and then rage-deleted prod at 5pm on their last day, you get to blame that dude at the post-mortem.
I agree with everything you said. I think you meant to write this to the other person. They kept trying to blame the entirety of leadership for a leadership failure and suggests “picking better leaders”.
I, like you, suggested that the process needs to be improved but I’m not sure how.
Ahhhhhh, legit, sorry. I’d read “whoever is responsible for this needs to go” as referring to only the malicious party—but “better leaders” does indeed suggest the GP wants multiple heads to roll.
You read it right the first time. I am just referring to the malicious party. By saying "better leaders" I mean get rid of the malicious part of your leadership. That will result in a better leadership, thus "better leaders". I must admit, maybe I am expressing myself a bit too mathematical here.
And how can what they did – presenting their own decision to other organisations or levels of their own organisation as if it were the legitimate “Leadership” consensus decision – how could that be anything other than a conscious and intentional act on their part, i.e, to use your term, “sabotage”? It's not like it could somehow be an accident, is it? “Oops, I slipped and fell onto my keyboard and these somewhat coherent and grammatically correct e-mails went out”?
Of-fucking-course it was sabotage, and of course they should be fired as all hell.
You should care because this becomes more and more the reputation of the language and as it pushes more and more talented people away the staying power of the language (and its ability to be "great") begins to diminish.
People don't need to be perfect, but if people are going to REPRESENT something (ie the Rust Language) they need to be better than the petty drama that the Rust team has been involved in over the last while.
As Rust the technology becomes increasingly important commercially, Rust the community will become more professional one way or another. Large companies want calm and predictable management of their core infrastructure. They have multiple levers, some overt, some less so, for getting it. Rust's leadership will either adopt professional standards of business conduct (as Linus did) or it will be replaced (like W3C was). There's too much riding on Rust now to leave its future up to emotion and chance.
This. I have avoided rust so far because I don't like the community around it and the reputation it's building. This type of drama really does effect the ecosystem.
Except (in my opinion) it's not, if the set of people responsible for the progress of the technology you(and mabye your company) are going to be using are able to make such terrible decisions, it opens doors for far worse on a scale where you will start to care(take a look at the code of conduct stuff(edit: I meant the trademark stuff); if they went ahead with it, which is very possible if they're willing to sidestep all ideas of democracy, then there would be some notable repercussions).
It means that, like everything that started at Mozilla, Rust will have some uncomfortable growth phase and then mature at some group that may or may not be the original one.
We can expect some mildly bad decisions on the language evolution. But it's very unlikely that this will open a niche for another language to replace Rust.
Only thing I can really see is mabye go/zig gaining more adoption but I don't think we're even close to that point yet, what's worrying is even discussing something like this happening in the first place. Ideally this sort of thing shouldn't even cross our minds.
Go is garbage collected so it’s unsuitable for the domain. Rust isn’t going away, no matter how many social snafus the steerage folks create.
I wish they would lay off the power tripper stuff, but that’s what you get at this level/size. Coming from where it’s coming from, it’s arguably going to be hammering itself out for awhile yet, while the world is already using it just fine… you may see splintered community though
>Why people having emotions (eg. The person above, who does care) is somehow a bad thing?
It's a bit of manipulation as nobody stated that having emotions is bad. Meanwhile, people leveraging unverifiable claims of bad feelings to hurt somebody is apparently ok... unless that somebody is you, of course.
People are literally calling it out. Nobody's obsessing.
It seems to me that OP feels like he is forced out by this behavior. To be forced out of a project you put your heart and soul into over several years, that can hurt.
Also the governance of the project is important if you want to invest in the ecosystem. These are the people who make the decisions for Rust. If you want to rely on Rust, you better trust them to make the right ones, and this here is (ostensibly) a strong example to the contrary.
> I really struggle to understand why:
1) I should care (I don’t, currently)
It’s unprofessional I guess. For the sake of Rust’s future, it should probably get better stewardship. If you agree to let someone speak then you should honour it.
I think being apathetic about it won't solve anything either. An expert leaving a is a big issue as that brings about the underlying rot in the committees way of handling bad or fool hardy behavior from a mob.
You maybe should care a little given the flaws it exposes in their processes or lack of managing the human element.
> I think being apathetic about it won't solve anything either.
How so? Me, a random Rust dev, can't ever make any difference in how is the foundation governed.
But, if you are telling us that the Rust leadership will e.g. actively follow this very HN thread and base their policy on it then yeah, then I'd agree with you.
Cause and Effect. You say "Rust is great". Why? Because People who work together effectively created Rust. And people working together have created most of the other things that are great. So if you want Rust, better Rust or more Rusts, then you may want to care whether the Rust organization will continue to work together effectively.
My 0.02 is that we live in a time where we are losing site of communities and focusing on individuals. Your comment appears to be an example of that. Human beings are adaptive and successful in general because they effectively work together. If you want to think about that idea, one of the things I've been pondering is how the Ukrainians have stood up to the vast power arrayed against them?
Or maybe Rust is great because Graydon was (presumably still is) an exceptionally skilled language designer and implementor. An increased focus on individuals makes sense to me because advances in technology give individuals more power, and it makes sense to me to minimize the overhead of coordination by making the most of that power to accomplish greater things with fewer people.
Did Graydon write the Rust analyzer? Did Graydon personally pen all of the documentation (let alone the books and tutorials) that contribute to Rust's usability? Rust is great primarily because it has a community of contributors that all work in various fields of the language to make it what it is. The sheer volume of work that needed to be done to get Rust to where it is today could not be shouldered on the backs of a small collection of skilled individuals; coordination and collaboration is essential for a project like Rust.
You can find countless research papers out there that present a brilliant idea devised and implemented by a skilled individual that ultimately goes nowhere despite its merit. Skilled individuals still need community to expand their work to the scope that will allow the idea to really shine.
(Note this is not meant to minimize Graydon's contributions to Rust's success, but to highlight the general principle that ideas require a community to grow into greatness)
Part of empathy is realizing when someone is authentically upset, and telling that apart from when they are being cynically melodramatic.
> I left because when I felt JeanHeyd's pain and disappointment at being mistreated and betrayed, my heart broke. I wept because of the cruelty. But I also wept because I helped create the system that could do this to someone.
This shit does not come off as authentic even a little bit.
Keep in mind that the author is on the spectrum, and the way they process emotions might not be the way you process emotions. Different cultures, different thought processes, different feelings.
I'd err on the side of believing people, unless and until they prove themselves to be insincere. Which is very much not the author's reputation, as far as I know.
People can be melodramatic sincerely. There's no reason to look for cynicism here.
You're right, it's not authentic or to be taken at face value. But that doesn't mean that there's not some authentic meaning that's being clearly communicated here. Look beyond the surface message!
> "I left because when I felt JeanHeyd's pain and disappointment at being mistreated and betrayed, my heart broke. I wept because of the cruelty. But I also wept because I helped create the system that could do this to someone."
I’m a bit hesitant to say this out loud, but… you can only cry over this “betrayal”, “mistreatment” and “cruelty” if you have lived a very protected life.
To me it looks like both sides are acting very emotional over the situation and using very loaded language to push their agendas forward. I almost feel the author is using discomfort even more as a weapon than the person who originally complained.
Which appears to be one of the underlying cultural flaws in the community to begin with. "Everyone sucks here" is a common situation because bad behavior is often a product of bad project culture.
> you can only cry over this “betrayal”, “mistreatment” and “cruelty” if you have lived a very protected life.
For some people, crying is just a way to deal with emotions. So please don’t judge.
I’ve been a professional software developer for more than 20 years. I still find myself weeping at work once in a while, especially when overwhelmed with hardship and negative feelings. I don’t see how this would be a sign of living “a very protected life.”
If your workplace is regularly bringing you to tears, you should start looking for a new position. No one needs a job with that level of emotional overhead.
He is saying “be an actual professional and don’t bring a vocabulary pertaining to intimate discussions to the public sphere when what’s discussed is a technical conference.”
It’s already barely acceptable in a purely American context. To me as a European, this is extremely off putting and culturally out of line which is a recurring problem with Rust.
It's a dog whistle. What the OP is actually saying is that he's extremely angry and pissed off that this was allowed to happen, and he's noping out for that eminently understandable reason. But if he said that in no uncertain terms (as a European very well might in similar circumstances!) he might fall afoul of the official Code of Conduct for being aggressive and threatening towards other contributors. Hence this weird talk about intimate "weeping" and "pain". Make no mistake, this is not some softy empath talk but quite the opposite!
> What the OP is actually saying is that he's extremely angry and pissed off that this was allowed to happen [...] But if he said that in no uncertain terms [...] he might fall afoul of the official Code of Conduct for being aggressive and threatening towards other contributors.
So they need reverse psychology to express anger at injustice because of the Code of Conduct? What is this world we're building?
A hundred years ago I would be going to mass on Sunday just so people thought I was a good Christian. Now I nod my empty head in fake agreement to all the "progressive" nonsense being spewed in professional circles.
Well, except here. This is essentially a throwaway account with no ties to my professional self. "Give the man a mask and he'll tell you the truth" sort of thing.
You're basically correct. The frustration many of us have, largely people slightly older than the core HN crowd, is that for a brief moment in the 90s and early 2000s we didn't have any of this dogma that could demand you nod along. You could be openly gay, openly Christian, conservative, leftist, or apolitical.
There were groups that still tried, but they were all too weak. The cultural conservativism of the 80s had no real hold anymore, and the political correctness of the 90s was mostly a joke. People would make fun of their opponents, but everyone openly disagreed. You wouldn't be fired from your job, or banned from otherwise unrelated communities.
We really thought that the internet was going to keep making this better. Instead we ended up with the most restrictive and widespread regime that has existed in most of our lifetimes. Luckily that seems to be losing its hold, but the specific doctrine isn't really the point. The frustration is that we had something closer to the ideal, however imperfect, and completely lost it, and have almost an entire generation that has been taught to think that that's a good thing.
We had a world built entirely of people who were technical for the love of it. Those who were fascinated with computers and the internet before there was real money in it as a career. When no one cared about computers and left us alone the community built by a largely neurodiverse group had rational rules that made people that would fall into the inneagram 8 category feel comfortable. Not just neurodiverse either, despite the stereotype of the neckbeard with pocket protector women were better represented in the 70s and 80s computing community than later on. We may have surpassed that mark now though, I haven't compared numbers recently.
Edit: I used the term neurodiverse and then implied we all fell into one category of personality. That seems to conflict, but what I meant was that we didn't differ much in the way that we differed. It was a gatekept community of a certain category of people where the gatekeeper was just interest in the subject absent any monetary motivation.
> for a brief moment in the 90s and early 2000s we didn't have any of this dogma that could demand you nod along. You could be openly gay, openly Christian, conservative, leftist, or apolitical.
An awful lot of people didn't have the luxury of being openly gay in the 90s and 2000s. Depending on how old you are, this is naive at best or disingenuous at worst.
An awful lot of people still don't have the luxury of being openly gay in the 2020s, because they happen to live in militant theocratic states. People on the activist left often seem to conveniently forget this, in a way that can only be fairly described as "naive at best or disingenuous at worst".
It has nothing to do with New Atheism. You will find just as much drama - if not more - in religious communities of all kinds.
I think it has more to do with social media culture, which seems perpetually hyped emotionally.
You can't release a press release without claiming to be absolutely super excited for you guys about $mildly_interesting_new_thing. You can't run a non-trivial YouTube or TikTok channel if you don't over-emote wildly all the time. [1] IG is full of people who are incredibly #amazed and #grateful and add the hashtags to prove it.
I'm currently watching a YT series where some people visit abandoned parts of London tube stations. There's an insane level of constant emoting. It's like children's TV. Everyone is smiling and happy and just fantastic, and everything they see is awesome, amazing, incredible, and absolutely their favourite thing ever.
Which is weird when they're mostly just filming dusty old abandoned corridors, some of which have some historical interest.
If this is normal for you, you can't say "I really don't like what happened so I'm going to resign" without turning it into a widescreen tentpole weepy drama movie experience.
However or whenever this happened it's clearly normalised now. I think we're going to be stuck with it for a while.
[1] I've known people who tried to cut down on the emoting and their stats went right down.
I'm tempted to add a CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md to my main project repo with the following:
Be direct. No bullshit. Don't worry about offending anyone, including the project leader; just say what needs to be said about the technical merits of whatever is being discussed. We're all here to [insert project goal]; let's do so with a minimum of drama.
But it's probably better to continue to not have a CoC, and just quietly lead by example instead.
There is a writers’ Facebook group which states its moderation policy like this: “the group is moderated very lightly. We are not your parents; if you have a disagreement, work it out among yourselves.” I like this policy.
And it kinda sorta works.
That’s not saying that CoCs were not a kind of response to some pathological behaviors in online communities: you often are going to get either socially inept man-children, or people on the spectrum, and there are kindergarten-level conflicts. You get programmers who attach themselves to their work too much, have very strong opinions, and often will treat a set of rules as a puzzle you need to game, without much concern towards any consequences.
But my oh my, do lots of popular CoCs look like solution for that problem invented by the same kind of socially inept man-children who are the part of the problem. They likely have read the word “empathy” in a dictionary, but don’t understand what it means in their bones.
I have an even less charitable theory of what CoCs might be about, really, but for now I’m applying Hanlon’s razor and stick to what I’ve stated above.
Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure that adding something like that would make things worse and open the door to wasting your time on pointless issues like "Why are you using this code of conduct instead of $my_pet_code_of_conduct?", whereupon you tell them they're not working towards the project goal, which leads to even more drama. It's simply not worth it.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, open an issue about the code of conduct.
>So they need reverse psychology to express anger at injustice because of the Code of Conduct? What is this world we're building?
All of life is change and cycles and oscillations. Not just human society but even whole ecosystems. Very likely this approach will be pushed to extremes, implode and then the cycle will swing the other way. There are valid reasons for this cultural shift and like all such shifts those supporting it need to experience the failure of going too far. Eventually some less extreme equilibrium will come about.
Why would a “this is what happened and it’s the reason I’m not longer going to be involved in the Rust project going further” possibly be able to violate a Code of Conduct?
Sure if you start calling people an asshole or lash out. But that’s similarly uncalled for…
Everyone is free to nope out. And people noping out is something that Rust (the community) needs to take into account. _Because_ it depends on them. But as is.. I’m unsure if this kind of emotional involvement is even something Rust (the project) _should_ want
Because this is what happens when you try to restrict not only speech, but how community members even express themselves for fear someone might be hurt or offended.
* They talk in private and take decisions in improper venues
* The guy is slighted at the last minute, told it is because of X
... is an all too "professional" way to do it. This is how professionals will do it, when they want to let you know they don't like you. With a little deniability, but not too much. If what the complainant alleges is true, there are too much social skill at work here - skill at exquisitely snubbing someone.
I think he is saying that words such as "cruelty" and "betrayal" have a weight in them that are way out of proportion to the events that took place.
I am a bit out of the loop (I don't know who the people involved are), but I tend to agree, I think. Sounds like a mix of miscommunication and group politics. Those are things that people might get upset, but the exaggerated response sounds like a cheap appeal to raw emotions.
rust needs it's empaths, too. if we can all figure out how to adult, be decent, work together, and understand the strengths/weaknesses of our very different personalities and skills, hopefully we can all continue building cool stuff together without alienating important voices.
Part of adulting is responding proportionally to childish behavior in others. Events like this feel like my toddlers fighting—he takes her pencil so she tears his paper so he hits her so she comes crying to mommy.
The adult in the room deescalates, they don't write an emotional blog about how betrayed they feel on behalf of someone else.
That depends on the power balance. Adults have power over children. The author does not have power over the people involved. Deescalating when you lack power is often little different from not saying anything at all. This is why most non-generational change to existing power structures involves large groups of very angry people. Same reason complaining about your Google Account getting locked on social media is more effective than spending the rest of your life going through their process.
The real question is if the Rust project has an equitable governance structure that minimizes imbalances of power or if it doesn't. If it does then the author should follow that instead of a large angry blog post. If it doesn't then he may as well go with the large angry blog post.
We're teaching our children to respond appropriately to conflict—in the situation above, either one of them can deescalate by approaching the conflict reasonably. He could have avoided it altogether by asking nicely for her pencil. She could deescalate by recognizing that he really wanted her pencil and making a trade that they both are happy with. It's hard for them to do because their escalatory actions feel more immediately effective at bringing "justice", but they don't work out in the long run.
The cycle of childishness isn't going to be solved by a post that triggers an internet mob, that's just another childish response in the cycle.
>We're teaching our children to respond appropriately to conflict—in the situation above, either one of them can deescalate by approaching the conflict reasonably. He could have avoided it altogether by asking nicely for her pencil. She could deescalate by recognizing that he really wanted her pencil and making a trade that they both are happy with. It's hard for them to do because their escalatory actions feel more immediately effective at bringing "justice", but they don't work out in the long run.
Again you're using an example of two children who are equal in power dynamics. Now try having a child deescalate an angry adult. Most people would not find that a reasonable request.
The author isn't a child to the core team's adult, they were one of four members of the core team [0]. They're not an individual contributor who feels incapable of effecting change in the wider org, they were mad at the way one of their peers handled the situation.
That requires either both sides to be equal in power or both sides to be willing to stick to the process. From the blog the author believes neither is the case.
The author was one of four members of the core team [0], "which is which is ultimately responsible for all decision-making in the project."[1] If there was a power imbalance it's because they were ineffective in their position.
This is modern wokespeak for "what you did is unprofessional and I'm not sticking around for more." A lot of the emotional hyperbole in this blog post is essentially that - emotional vulnerability and sensitivity is valued in "hyper-woke" contexts, while words like "unprofessional" are seen as callous - and I kind of read it that way rather than literally.
I still don't want to do them the favor of normalizing such dramatic language by accepting it. Just call it "unprofessional" if you truly feel that it was.
Unfortunately, you have to write for your audience. The audience for this piece seems to want emotional melodrama combined with diffusion of responsibility.
My decision to leave was driven by witnessing the negative impact on JeanHeyd resulting from the actions taken by Rust. The situation raised concerns about the treatment and the breach of trust that occurred. It made me reflect on the role I played in the development of the system and whether I want to continue to be associated with it.
"I decided to depart after recognizing the profound sense of disillusionment and dissatisfaction JeanHeyd experienced due to perceived unfair treatment and deception. The depth of this unfairness, reaching a level that I perceived as unjust, deeply resonated with me. This situation highlighted a need for better communication and understanding within the community, prompting my decision to step back. I express my deepest regret over these circumstances, and I sincerely hope for improvements in our conduct and interactions going forward."
Not sure how much the empathy levels of someone -- not an objective metric -- should be used when making professional calls about speakers in a foundation but you do you.
The underlying problem seems to be: sidestepping democratic processes. IMO that is what should be addressed first and foremost.
I think it’s more important to engage with the contents of the post rather than your misgivings with the author’s writing style. Honestly it’s a childish approach to have.
Criticizing how the author (who just left Rust) engages with the community while he himself criticizes how engagement with the community is done is rather valuable.
Good to know you wouldn’t want to work with anyone autistic or on the spectrum.
Which is the case here.
The thing is that the people on here taking about “being adults” are the least tolerant or understanding that people experience things and express things differently.
It's bizarre that you're scolding this person for being intolerant while implying such language is to be expected of "anyone autistic or on the spectrum". To me, that is offensive stereotyping.
Was actually super surprised by that line. Was with the post until then.
Yes, treat people with respect, but we also need people to have even a marginal resilience to adversity. The bar for being emotionally damaged seems to be getting lower and lower for people.
If you can’t take criticism, don’t work in open source. You will never have 100% support from all people at all times. Many developers will manage social interactions (and organizing conferences) badly. That’s life
This whole saga has been legitimate grievances clouded by lengthy blog posts that could have been so much shorter and less dramatically written. The other blog about this controversy clocked in at over 2000 words!
Agreed, that part was a little ehh for me too. And I think a resignation is a complete overreaction, but hey, I'm not close to any of these people so what do I know.
The original behavior is childish. And the quoted paragraph I have there about it revealing some internal mechanics of the leadership group is an important observation, one I'm much more concerned with.
It's revealing that Rust's open operation may not be so open after all. That can quickly cause a lot of problems if not quelled.
> Much less weight should be given to someone "feeling uncomfortable"
I think it depends what you're uncomfortable with. I remember some drama about removing some speakers from security conferences a while back, because people were understandably uncomfortable with them being rapists.
But being uncomfortable with ... talk about how compile time reflection might work in future versions of Rust? Huh? What?
Also I do agree about the language. People are from different cultures and so on, yada yada, but to me the used language feels very overdramatized and childish.
Look at the leadership. They have a large number of non-technical people and placeholders. The reason why it has ended up becoming political is because Rust is run by politicians.
>Much less weight should be given to someone "feeling uncomfortable"
If anything, people should be pushed to accepting feeling uncomfortable. It means they're meeting challenging ideas, opposing viewpoints, and getting out of their comfort zone and echo bubble.
Except if "not feeling comfortamble" is because someone e.g. exposes their junk, or farts endlessly on purpose during a conference. That, sure, should be curbed.
It is absolutely having an impact on the outside. I'm currently putting together the architecture of our new Content Delivery platform, and considering different parts of the stack. The look from the outside is of a project who recently has been making very bad decisions from leadership - it makes me consider what to get our team to upskill in, or to hire on, as we move away from "everything in JS".
Leaving (or excluding yourself from) something because of "personal reasons" is very different to excluding someone else because of your own discomfort, though.
>Rust members were "uncomfortable" with this purely technical viewpoint - not their behavior, personal beliefs, or even their demographic?
Claim of "feeling uncomfortable" was invented to be a tool of political fighting which allows to declare something, or somebody as unacceptable, completely avoiding debates. As it's becoming generally normalized, it's absolutely logical that it spills into other fields of human interaction. It's simple, and efficient, so why not?
It's also great because there's no way for you to dispute my claims of feeling uncomfortable / "unsafe", since these (alleged) feelings occur in my own head. No one can dispute my feelings. And if you're foolish enough to allow my (claimed) feelings to govern your behaviour I now have arbitrary control over you. Neat huh?
> As it's becoming generally normalized, it's absolutely logical that it spills into other fields of human interaction. It's simple, and efficient, so why not?
Is this sarcasm? I think it's pretty obvious why not. Broken communication, poor decisions, and the obvious fallout.
Not sarcasm I think you just didn’t understand; they are not asking for reasons why it would be bad for this behavior to spread, but rather asking what’s stopping it? And it sounds like a rhetorical question as posed
The corresponding magic phrase in liberal US school systems has become “equity issue.” I’m a pretty progressive guy but the number of times I’ve seen people “win” debates by declaring that their opponent’s ideas cause an “equity issue” with absolutely no rationale is unreal. And it can be applied no matter what position you’d like to support. Online work is an equity issue because poor kids don’t have computers. Giving all kids free laptops is an equity issue because poor kids don’t have professional parents who know how to help them use them. You can’t win.
And, related to the OP, I believe one reason this ends up being used as a weapon is that it’s so arbitrary, you can never predict when or how it might be sprung on you, so it behooves you to go on the offense and invent the equity issues, vague “discomfort”, and declare others witches in the interest of self-preservation.
True, human behavior is actually nearly identical, then and now. Superstition, religion etc. have new avatars that may bear little resemblance to their ancestors, but they are all well and alive in their new forms.
Some important context that's missing from your summary (and something I wasn't aware of until I dug into it more) is that the author was a member of Rust's core team [0] and the interim leadership group responsible for designing Rust's new governance structure [1]. They were the one who posted the new RFC on project governance [2].
This isn't a case of one person who was powerless to stop what happened and felt that making a big stink on the internet was the only solution—this was one of the primary decision makers shaping the future of Rust. I think there's a lot of context missing from this blog post about why they felt the need to resign rather than use their position to improve decision making.
For now I'm withholding judgement on who will turn out to be in the right.
While the language itself looks fine, I find the community a bit off-putting.
First the thing with the code of conduct and all that, that I think distracts from the technical questions. It is important to be inclusive, as not to exclude people who could make valuable contributions, but if it becomes a topic of argument, then it becomes counter-productive.
The second is the "rewrite it in Rust" crowd. I mean, no language is strictly better than another, it is all about tradeoffs. And rewriting a piece of software is not a decision to be taken lightly, see the "second system" anti-pattern. Rust has a place, maybe an important place, but I dislike fanaticism in general.
The first point seems to have died off a little, and most discussions I see about Rust now seem to be technical, which is a good point. And I expect the second point to become a bit less prevalent as the language becomes mainstream and stories about people being miserable with Rust will inevitable surface. I don't think a language can be considered mature unless (some) people start hating using it.
> While the language itself looks fine, I find the community a bit off-putting
I have wondered now and then about how the Rust community culture might have damaged the language. In particular, I've said for many years that Rust botched error handling by eschewing exceptions yet including panics anyway, leading to a doubling of the error handling infrastructure (you pay for both error objects and stack unwinding support) and the inability of the standard library to survive allocation failure.
It's an unfixable mistake, although the language designers have walked it back the best they can over the years, culminating in the current yeet proposal.
Did Rust end up with both errors and panics because the community suppressed robust debate in the name of kindness and "safety"? Was the current approach a way to try to make everyone happy without conflict?
> Did Rust end up with both errors and panics because the community suppressed robust debate in the name of kindness and "safety"? Was the current approach a way to try to make everyone happy without conflict?
I've been hanging around /r/rust and poking at other venues since at least 2013 and my understanding was that the exception-like appearance of panics arose organically from:
1. Let's have monadic error handling for catchable stuff and an ASSERT equivalent for bugs that cannot be reasonably handled.
2. Our ownership system and mutex poisoning allows us to make strong guarantees about where invalid state is observable. Let's let a thread ASSERT without taking down the whole program.
3. It'd be nice to have RAII cleanup on an ASSERT
4. It'd be nice to have automatic diagnostics on an ASSERT failure
5. Gee, it's really awkward to have to spawn a thread in order to be able to translate an ASSERT failure into an error code when we're exposing a C API from Rust code. Let's add catch_unwind. (std::panic::catch_unwind didn't get stabilized until Rust 1.9.)
The clearest expression of this is that libraries cannot opt back into unwinding when the application that depends on them sets panic=abort. If an application says "I have no need to continue with the following job/request/etc. after a programming error in a single unit of work", the libraries it depends on aren't allowed to countermand that and, if they try, it's their fault for abusing panics. Panics are overgrown ASSERTs, not an underbuilt exception system.
Other replies have made excellent points but I'd also like to point out that in the world of Rust the only time you want your code to panic is when something irrecoverable (at a very low level) happens. Like if you're messing around with bare metal/embedded stuff and you just set a (hardware) register but for whatever reason that call failed so now you can be guaranteed that the rest of your code just can't work. It's panic time!
If a crate is using panic because it encountered bad input or whatever then the crate isn't doing things in a rusty sort of way. Even if it's a wrapper around an unsafe C library that uses panic everywhere the language has tools to work around that which is not the same thing as having made an inherent, unfixable mistake in the design of the language (by having more than one way to deal with errors).
Unwinding is optional, and not available on all platforms that Rust supports (including WebAssembly). The language made the right choice here IMO. Lack of faillible allocation in the stdlib is a major issue, but it's also fixable.
Actually relying on panics for unwinding in any way is not encouraged in any way, and compiling with `panic = 'abort'` is really common, and completely removes all stack unwinding support.
As someone learning the language on production code I must agree that the error handling of Rust is terrible. Exceptions have never been a struggle point for me with other languages, but Rust error handling has literally given me headaches.
From Rust team discussion at Reddit, it's not that anyone sprints away, the answer is that no one has the time to balance volunteering for Rust, working on code, reviewing, doing technical review, and then on top of that moderation and doing diplomatic stuff.
Essentially no-one wants to do diplomatic stuff, so it falls to only person that likes doing that stuff (which isn't a good thing). Which can leads to episodes like this.
Do read the full thing, but it roughly boils down to "If it happens at a time/on a day of the week when we have more moderator bandwidth available, we will make use of it to be more lenient. In the worst case it escalates to targeted harassment, and I promised myself to never let another 'Actix developer harassed into hiding' incident happen. Was it heavy-handed? Yes, and I wouldn't do it lightly. Also, I expect that anyone who really wants to know what was deleted can go to Reddit mirror/archive sites and the case you're referring to was the first time I had to act since Reddit surprised them by shutting down API access for the Pushshift service they relied on."
> only person that likes doing that stuff... leads to episodes like this
This reminds me of an episode in Scrubs where one of the residents volunteers to announce bad news to patients or family [1].
Several patients later, the lead doc tells them, "... if you could stop worrying so much about who does and doesn't notice... you. Even for a second... that'd be good; that'd be real good."
Their plaintive explanation previously was, "I just wanted to be colleagues."
It wouldn't surprise me volunteers pick up diplomatic work, and it just doesn't jive like a computer program at all. With humans, who knows what we are getting into?
Should we have goals up-front before we dive into open-source? Whether it's for respect and recognition, or a completely selfless quest for the good of a project we care about, or something else.
Maybe we just love to write code; the project is cool; and we just want to be involved.
I guess we have to be ready when the system does not behave like we expect, and we can't QA behavior or choices. That's the hard part of soft skills.
From the very beginning Rust was a political movement first, and a programming lang second.
People seemed to have forgotten some of the early events from years ago when Rust was less popular.
>>The Rust project needs to stamp this out before it begins to fester
It has been there since the formation of the Lang, it is built into the DNA of the community. people that want technical merits to shine are the ones trying to change the community, not the other way round
Everyone knows those are a childish tool used by bully nerds to wield power over others with this fake better than thou outlook on things that have nothing to do with programming or the computer.
Like seriously I’m on a computer remotely discussing tech with people. I don’t personally care about who the other person is or does beyond their contribution to the repo and topic at hand. Beyond that, to weaponize decent behavior as a tool to do additional things, is not right.
Sorry but when can we stop taking “developer advocate” type people seriously? They’re usually not devs or technical (at least in my own experience), and add all these side things which make no sense except in political organizations.
No, no. Groups that have endless infighting/debates are the ones that evolve, stick around, and gain support. It's the groups that are cock-sure about everything with everyone falling in line behind the leadership that end up stagnating and ultimately end up being replaced with something better (often with bitter or explosive endings).
In the world of technology, fundamental tech like programming languages can persist seemingly forever but the truth is that there's great big winners and a whole lot of losers. We also don't like to compare seemingly-unrelated languages to each other because of their fundamental differences in how they're meant to be used but the truth is that a lot more people know and learn Python than will ever learn C or C++ (or Rust).
It's because C and C++ never really evolved into better languages. They never got rid of the bad ideas (e.g. goto) and just kept piling on new stuff, leaving new learners of the language just that much more to have to learn.
Languages like Rust and Python actually remove old, bad syntaxes/ideas and implement checks and helpful compiler messages regarding bad patterns. IMHO, this makes them vastly more likely to be around 25, 50, or even 100 years from now than languages (or OSes) that never remove technological debt.
Python removing "bad" old ideas caused it to stagnate on 2.7 for a decade and probably did irreversible harm to the ecosystem as people left for languages that didn't have a nasty split in the community.
C++ has evolved tremendously so I have no idea what you're talking about there. Removing "goto" would help nothing, and the more or less deprecated features keep old codebases alive while allowing for better things (shared pointers and so on)
No mention of the fact that you cherry picked virtual machine languages, dynamic interpreted languages that don’t even exist without a garbage collector, a system memory allocator, and more, all written in C,C++, or Rust?
In many ways it is a "you had to be there" type of thing...
If you were around the internet when Rust was first being formed at Mozilla, understanding the history there and the transition of Mozilla from a pure tech company to a political organization is part of the story as well
I will say my first introduction to Rust was not as a programming lang, but was one of the many many many posts around the internet at the time where the founder and other core members were defending their CoC, and talking about how they were more focus on the "behavior" of developers than on the code, or technical merits of programming.
Rust has always been more about about controlling human behaviors (i.e politics) than it about controlling computers.
Notable that this was published on Friday evening/Saturday morning. The Rust project/leadership committee/RustConf folks need to coordinate, come to a consensus, make some painful decisions and communicate that with a united voice. That’s not going to happen on a weekend because some folks might not be available.
I agree with everything that the speaker and JT have said in their respective posts. This is unacceptable, it needs to be fixed and the person who was “uncomfortable” needs to be held accountable.
But I think it’s worth waiting for a couple of working days before picking up our pitchforks. Let’s give folks the benefit of the doubt. Let’s not ask the Rust committee to “grow up” when they haven’t done anything yet and haven’t even had a chance to respond.
> They're asked to speak at RustConf after a leadership vote.
> They've also written an article about reflection in Rust[...]
> Rust members were "uncomfortable" with this purely technical viewpoint [...].
As I understand their own words (your link), they wrote the article, were invited to talk, and decided to talk about the content of the article and related things (because that’s what they had been working on recently and you generally give talks about things you work on).
Not making a value judgment, just want to point out the connection is less indirect than your comment implies.
> Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low.
Conference speakers is the definition of low stakes rife for pointless politicking.
I honestly don't understand why the Rust compiler reflection tech talk was the slightest bit controversial. Even if no one is in favor of the proposal, it can still be an interesting thought experiment. Such issues may expose design issues.
I agree with other commenters: anyone who is prone to playing politics with these low stakes issues needs to be pruned before they do real damage.
Right. I didn't realize it was that sort of reflection, see my edit.
I don't know if their approach is the right one. I think the visitor pattern is a bit limited in usefulness (where it fits nicely for serde, it'll fall flat for other more exotic use cases I think. But I've not thought about it for more than about 5 minutes and haven't considered any other possible alternatives - they have.)
However, I agree with them in that the current song and dance with syn being the prevailing defacto crate most of our macros are built on is a bit absurd, especially since they refuse to open up proc_macro internals for use by the public. I can certainly see both sides' points but the net effect is that, right now, the macro business yields subpar error handling and feels very much hacked on rather than being a natural part of the language like most other things in Rust seem to.
I don't get it at all. Why would this would be inappropriate to cover in a keynote. Whether or not it ends up in the language, it's interesting material. It seems like it may be a case of people taking themselves too seriously; "we can't have that topic in our precious keynote!". Nobody cares!
I think it would be totally reasonable for a core member to say something like, "I'm uncomfortable with a keynote about this compile time reflection from Person1. I think it could look like we're endorsing it more than we are prepared for." That's exactly how I might think and talk about some extensive complex proposal from some outsider for a problem that I have some ideas on how we might want to solve. All the people upset about the keynote changes describe it in such like exaggerated form, that to me it's hard to just believe that they are the reasonable ones here.
Compile-time reflection is great in principle. It gets us quite close to the aim of compile-time dependent types, which would be a great feature for Rust and bring it close to parity with newer languages such as Zig, as well as lay the groundwork for further important developments such as proof-carrying code. It would be quite important to know why this Rust team member felt "uncomfortable" with the technical contents of this talk which were clearly described by the author as highly speculative, and thus inherently open to discussion.
Declining a keynote because you disagree with it just works to highlight a lack of welcoming of diverse viewpoints in the community. Having a perspective highlighted you disagree with would actually show how open and welcoming the community is.
This assumes of course the person was not making promises on behalf of the project to the community (who knows maybe they were?) but rather expressing their own opinions.
Having a keynote is not some endorsement that this is the future direction of the project.
>Rust members were "uncomfortable" with this purely technical viewpoint - not their behavior, personal beliefs, or even their demographic?
>And then they pushed them out of the conference behind leadership's back?
>Did I miss something? This is indeed really childish behavior.
You're jumping to a lot of conclusions here. The article was written by someone who is clearly upset about the incident and doesn't go into a lot of detail about the motivation of the other party ("as best as I understand it, because of the content of JeanHeyd's blog post on reflection"). Would the "uncomfortable" team members agree that it was a matter of "comfort" that was caused primarily by the topic of a blog post? Are any relevant facts, by any chance, left out of the article? We don't know.
What we do know is that it didn't happen behind the leadership's back: "This discomfort was brought to the interim leadership group [...] A person in Rust leadership then [...] reached directly to RustConf leadership [...] RustConf leadership decided to wait a week [...] giving Rust leadership time to change its mind."
I feel like I’ve observed similar “childish” behavior from the Go community more so, and to some degree in even the C# community where people were upset at Microsoft’s probably-malicious decisions (like removing Blazor debugging from non-Windows environments). Some of their proposed and implemented C# changes in the last couple of years seem really asinine too, not just to me but hundreds+ who voice their disappointment on Github.
This is a very egotistical industry and this is one of many ways that manifests.
> More specifically, I was nominated by “Rust Project Leadership” (to be exact with the wording) to give a keynote
That wording is misleading. If what this “Rust Project Leadership” committee says doesn't stick but can be overridden by someone (or someones) else, then they're not actually leading anything; the overrider is.
Have these people realised yet that they're just a façade?
>> The Rust project needs to stamp this out before it begins to fester. This is incredibly stupid behavior coming from what is being regarded as the next C++.
>> Come on, Rust committee. Let's grow up here, shall we?
It is too much power held by one group with too little accountability.
More transparency is needed and more people from different organizations need to be involved.
The fact that JT and the rest of us have to guess what really happened speaks volumes.
Keep in mind that this whole thing started only about 36 hours ago. The internet conditions us to expect immediacy but this is all being done by volunteers on a holiday weekend, not a corporate PR department. I doubt the full teams involved will even be able to convene until Tuesday at least due to people on vacation.
The accountability must happen and shouldn't be ignored, and I hope that various parties step forward to handle the mea culpa responsibly, but it's a bit early to grab the pitchforks, light the torches and march to the town square.
> And then they pushed them out of the conference behind leadership's back?
Effectively, but worth noting for clarity that they only explicitly wanted to demote the talk from keynote. But as this was disrespectful, the speaker withdrew entirely.
I may misunderstand something here, but I'd assume the organizers of a conference are in charge of deciding which talk goes where. Why is there an expectation for this to be different here?
If I was askwd to give a keynote somewhere and upon presentation of my topic the organization decides another talk is better suited I would trust them that they wouldn't do that lightly.
Come on, Rust committee. Let's grow up here, shall we
Rust may, or may not, be the next best thing. However, the zealotry expressed by some rust pundits, is very off putting to me. One thing I have learned, is that zealotry is where moral compromise enters, it is where "for their own good" and "the ends justify the means" starts, followed by concepts such as "we need to force people to understand".
Some rust pundits seem to be such zealots, injecting rust commentary into everything. Almost religious.
Thus, I am not surprised by this. To speak ill of the holy relic, to utter dissent, drives zealots to mad excess!
You are generalizing. This is a very isolated incident, and one that I as a Rust dev am baffled about. It seems poorly handled by all sides involved.
Have in mind that 99.99% of Rust devs out there chose it on technical merits and couldn't care less about their internal infighting even if we were paid to care.
Yeah, it's an isolated incident just like all the other isolated incidents in Rust. Anyone remember the Rust Foundation trademark oopsie literally a month ago where the RF wanted to control in fine detail the usage of the name and logo?
Not sure what you're saying, truthfully. Could you please clarify?
My point is the same: most people don't care (and I mean 99.99%; what we've seen in the last days is basically high school drama and no aduy takes such feuds seriously).
The only real danger is that strong contributors leave. We the working Rust devs could feel that at some point in the future.
But even that possibility isn't that scary. Rust is quite mature in many ways already. Most innovation happens in libraries at this point.
I'm skeptical. This incident in particular doesn't prove that Rust has more zealots.
Every single Rust dev I've worked with is a normal programmer who prioritizes merit and rational process.
If you're already unfriendly towards the Rust community then this incident will only deepen your bias. I urge you to not assess the community with this flawed thought process. Rust devs are like all others.
> Rust has more zealots, than every other language combined.
> And it seems as if saying that the rust community has some zealots, upsets you.
First saying "more than every other language combined" and then changing tone to say "some" is disingenuous. And please don't try to technically argue that the former doesn't have to more then the latter - the underlying insinuation is pretty obvious.
> They've also written an article about reflection in Rust - a purely technical thing that is already pretty widely disliked conceptually.
Maybe that really is the problem. Too much reflection leads to clever, but hard to debug hacks. Look what happened with C++ templates and, further back, LISP macros.
That way lies code that's unusually hard to read and maintain. Rust probably shouldn't go that way.
Do you want to have a keynote address on an idea of that type? It's more of a subject for a proposal talk.
The would-have-been speaker's blog post addresses this question specifically. He apparently pushed back many times on the idea of giving the keynote on his work and was assured that the Rust organization was aware of the topic and wanted him to go ahead [0]. Then they walked back on that.
That's what I think most people find terrible about Rust leadership's handling of the situation. It's not that this specific keynote was super important, it's that the team let the speaker spend a few weeks preparing a keynote and then pulled the rug on him.
C++ templates are not reflection; either compile time or runtime. There is a form of reflection, but that's RTTI, which is a totally different ballgame.
True, but both come under the heading of adding a level of indirection at compile time. It's a tough language decision on how far to go in that direction. Go, pre-template, was minimalist on this. C++ probably went too far. Where to stop is a good question.
It's a shame that people are so thin-skinned they can't handle a difference of opinion on architecture. All I can say is wow. I feel they really need to use this as a moment of reflection. Is democracy dead? No committee will ever work if there has to be unanimous decisions on everything, unless you are living in an echo chamber.
> And then they pushed them out of the conference behind leadership's back?
If I understand the story correctly, they downgraded the talk from a keynote to a regular talk. Which — if, like you say, was about purely technical thing that was pretty widely disliked conceptually — maybe shouldn't have been a keynote in the first place?
I see similar behaviors in multiple online "tech savvy" communities. I tend to minimize the behavior to "they don't know how to handle an online community and behave in a very childish way". It seems we need to recap what OSS communities have learnt from decades.
> Rust members were "uncomfortable" with this purely technical viewpoint
FTA:
> It was JeanHeyd who called Rust out for having no Black representation
The implication here is that this person was uninvited for pushing a SJW agenda that the author agrees with but that rust’s “shadowy” leadership doesn’t.
Technical opinions aren’t something we’re born with, they’re not intrinsic and uncontrollable properties of a person, and technical opinions haven’t historically been subject to widespread discrimination or hate crimes or even social imbalance in terms of income, right? The protections we have for race and gender aren’t there to avoid discomfort or to avoid conflict, they’re there to avoid harmful discrimination and to reinforce the civil rights of all citizens.
The argument that opinion should be equally protected, or that conversely race and gender should not be protected seems very surprising coming from a gay black trans person, which makes me assume I probably don’t understand what you mean. I’m curious to hear why you say the sensitivity to race and gender is artificial and irrational, given the history of physical atrocities that have occurred.
All that said, this particular case isn’t about protected categories at all, is it? The issue was not the existence of a dissenting opinion, the issue was that it was handled unilaterally without consensus, against the stated mores and procedures of the organization. They had a codified process for “protecting” dissenting opinions, and someone ignored and broke that process. This isn’t to be confused or conflated with US (or any other country’s) labor law’s notion of a “protected class”, we’re talking about two completely different kinds of protection.
People who go through this often say that they do in fact have an intrinsic gender they’re born with that simply doesn’t match their sex. What changes is their expression, not their internal identification. Age changes too and it’s a protected class in some contexts. So, what if gender expression changes? What is your implication? Do you believe parent’s claim that gender and opinion are categorically similar, and that either opinions should be a protected class, or that race and gender should not be?
Everyone has an opinion. That's why we have committees, governments, etc, to have a voice. However, your or my opinion is no more valuable than anyone else's except to ourselves. I have definitely taken criticism of my code and architecture very hard, once I even got up after a meeting after my group voting against my architecture. I put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into over about a month of late nights and plenty coffee. However, I accepted the decision (by team committee I guess you could say. I didn't cry that my feelings were hurt. I was actually vindicated about a year later when that project fell apart under the crush of being very brittle, whereas mine would not have. However, I didn't gloat, I helped replace their brittle infrastructure with the one I had stuffed away in a zip file and almost forgotten about. However, stuff like that is just work. I think that has to be kept separate from human rights like respect for your gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, etc . Those should never be negotiable and no one should be made to feel "less than" are a separate concern. No one should have to put up with that, but I don't think that's what this is about at all. We should all have a thin-skin and maniacal defense of those basic human rights. Not so much when it comes to a language architecture. Life isn't about "feeling comfortable" in all circumstances. So I don't think those situations are similar at all.
You never stated the logical reason for why gender and race is different from technical opinions.
If I say gender dysphoria is an actual disease and defect in human biology and that gender reassignment only causes more problems then it fixes. Then that is an aspect of the truth. It is uncomfortable, but it is the truth.
Why should my comfort have extraordinary protection in this area but not in technical opinions?
I'll tell you why. Because neither should have protection. Discomfort shouldn't be protected. Only truth should be protected.
I agree with you in everything discomfort should have no protections at all, but the problem here is you're having a hard time separating truth and discomfort in the areas of gender and race. But you have an easy time of doing it with technical opinions. That is your bias.
I read through the original blog post from JeanHeyd[1] and in no way do they mention anything related to being a person of color, why then does JT associate it with that? I have no idea about the inner workings of the rust leadership team and who they are even, but from the timeline described and from the original post, there's nothing the could be related to that. JeanHeyd is a technical expert and not a token, I feel like introducing the issue of being "a person of color" (as if white is not a color, but whatever) is strange IMO and also needs to be called out. I respect and enjoy JT's work and learned a lot from them, but this is also something that should not be just mentioned casually. If JeanHeyd was invited or their talk demoted because of the color of their skin then there's totally different conversation to be had (and a totally different kind of accountability).
This behavior is disrespectful _regardless_ of the skin color of the expert! It doesn't change it one bit.
Just because they're not white shouldn't afford them any special treatment, and I say that as a non-white person. Merit is what counts, treating experts with affordance to their biology is patronizing at the very least.
I think moreso than specifically meaning JeanHeyd was target as such due to race, the implication was rather that since JeanHeyd had previously raised that the lack of diveristy in speakers at the conf. was an issue, some members voting on this may have held onto that.
But, it's ironic (and sad) that the same person who raised the issue of diversity in speakers - who would have been the first PoC doing a keynote - was treated like rubbish and essentially pushed out to the point they no longer feel comfortable being part of it at all. It's also interesting to note that while the issues the voting body had with their talk was solely to do with the content of the talk, it begs the question of if any other participant would be treated the same way in dealing with that issue arising. In my experience it's not uncommon for that sort of irony to play out, but that's purely anecdotal.
Also, of course white is a colour but I've always seen PoC as a slightly more language-open alternative to the previously commonly used "non-white" which feels notably like language from an era long past.
There are a few reasons that people prefer the term nonwhite over POC in certain contexts, and I think most people using it are using it intentionally because of them. The main issue is that the latter term is homogenizing:
> Political scientist Angelo Falcón argues that the use of broad terms like "person of color" is offensive because it aggregates diverse communities and projects "a false unity" that "obscure[s] the needs of Latinos and Asians".[39][40]
Another criticism I've heard is that the terminology for POC originated among black activists during the civil rights movement in the US who were reclaiming the term "colored" used in the Jim Crow/segregation era, and so it's only really appropriate for black people to use.
The former term (nonwhite) is iffy too, but sometimes it's a better descriptor
To be clear, I haven't heard many people voicing the second criticism -- I think most people using "nonwhite" subscribe to the former point of view
I'd look towards stratified sampling to think more formally around the issue.
POC is homogonizing because it's reducing the space from N strata to 2: white and non-white, blending n-1 strata.
Per wikipedia:
> Stratification is the process of dividing members of the population into homogeneous subgroups before sampling. The strata should define a partition of the population. That is, it should be collectively exhaustive and mutually exclusive: every element in the population must be assigned to one and only one stratum. Then simple random sampling is applied within each stratum
Using this definition, white and non-white are mutually exclusive, while location of origin forms a different axis for comparison.
In more social sciences, you might look to intersectionality for an explanation.
Moreover, who is white or non-white is political: currently a certain blood quantum is necessary for being American Indian; yet, in recent history under the one drop rule, for African Americans it was the inverse. The difference is material, as former was entitled to a say in land on a reservation, while the latter did not.
Yes! You get it. The difference is that “white” is constructed as an in-group identifier, that has been adapted as needed to include previously non-white groups such as Jews and Italians.
I'm pretty sure "person of colour" means literally the same thing as "non white" in the US, I find it hard to care about such minor differences in phrasing.
Yeah I'd tend to agree with the issues it being a homogenizing term as a whole (ie. often used awkwardly), however in this context where we're using it in order to refer to homogenization (that being, those who have had historically less power in white/male dominated industry), it seems a little softer of a homogenizing term as compared to 'non-white'.
Although, my perspective is of course informed by how I've internalized my local community use this language in certain ways. In South Africa, where white people are just 8% of the population, it seems stranger to make reference to the subject through that caveat rather than in, say, a US context the inverse may seem more uncontroversially worded.
Interestingly, as a side, I'm considered coloured in South Africa - a term taken on here by mixed race folks as a disambiguation of the American term, in a similar fashion to how you describe the origin of the PoC term.
I agree with your statement as a whole but have a small nitpick (on your small nitpick)
> as if white is not a color
But ‘person of color’ doesn’t include white people in the same way that ‘anti-semitic’ doesn’t include racism against Arabs. Yes, Arabs are also of Semitic descent, and yes white is a color, the meanings are not one-to-one mapped from their components. To deny that is to deny large portions of the English language.
It's OK to use this sort of playing with words in your stand-up routine, (e.g. Tylor Tomlinson's "Lot of my friends are settling down. Some are just settling, period, end of sentence") in a song, a book title, that sort of thing, but we shouldn't pretend we've got a serious argument here, we've got a coincidence maybe, at best.
Not to mention the fact that construction can be messy for other reasons. I present a bit from George Carlin's routine on airline announcements:
"Here's one they just made up: Near miss. When two planes almost collide, they call it a near miss. It's a near hit! A COLLISION is a near miss. explosion sound Look, they nearly missed! YES, BUT NOT QUITE!"
As a (somewhat) native Chinese speaker, the contents of this page is kind of confusing to me, because as far as I can tell, the original saying sounds correct, or at least not wrong.
If you search online for the phrase "有危就有機" (literally meaning: where there is danger there is opportunity) you'll see many results. It's a common saying (that said this could be due to influence by the English world, who knows).
It's true that "機" by itself can have different meanings, and "in isolation" probably should mean 'change point' rather than 'opportunity'... but that's kind of splitting hairs since the meanings kind of blend together. Also, in Mandarin I don't recall seeing any use of "機" "in isolation", making the claim rather contrived. In my native Cantonese, "機" in isolation usually means "機會" i.e. chance or opportunity.
I also observe that the wikipedia page points to non-Chinese sources that "debunk" the myth. I have no idea why they felt the need to be so pedantic about this case... Meanwhile, on social media we routinely see quotes attributed to Confucius, and sometimes it's a fun game trying to figure out whether the quote was legit, poorly translated, or completely made up :P
"somewhat" is a strange word to use in this context and probably warrants more explanation. Are you perhaps a child immigrant, and so you have a few early years of exposure in an environment with Cantonese everywhere and then moved somewhere else?
Yes an English Wikipedia article will tend to cite English text on the subject, because the assumption would be that it's mostly being read by people in English so text written in another language is less accessible. Also the quote it's debunking is English (it's by US President John F Kennedy), not Chinese.
Cantonese is a bit different from the "standard" Mandarin Chinese, so that's one factor. I also grew up in a very bilingual environment in Hong Kong, and had a short stint living abroad during my younger years (I started primary school in Australia, so I basically learned to write in English before I learned to write in Chinese.)
My schooling is like 80% in English, and even today with bilingual documents I read things much faster in English than Chinese.
Thanks for explaining what you meant by "somewhat". One of the people whose opinion about JFK's quote gets a lot of play is Victor Mair, Victor thinks it'd be better to focus on teaching Pinyin rather than get Chinese kids to invest so heavily in the Han writing system which makes alphabetic systems look trivial - and if you're willing I'd be interested in what you think of that as somebody who learned the Latin alphabetic writing system (for English) first, but was heavily exposed to spoken Cantonese much before that.
Learning the Han characters is difficult, and for a foreigner learning the language, if you mostly want to communicate verbally it's quite obvious which the easy path is.
But for native Chinese children, learning Han characters is a matter of cultural identity :) Also, once you've spent the time learning it, the ability to comprehend ancient Chinese texts up to ~2500 years old is pretty nice. Most people don't need to do this (but I do), but it's kind of a culturally accepted overhead of keeping the cultural continuity. I think most learned Chinese teachers recognize this "problem", but it's just accepted as a fact of life, and I don't think it's gonna change any time soon.
I personally paid this "cost" too, Chinese was my most dreaded subject in school, and I while I never had any issue recognizing/reading characters, I couldn't hold them all in my head and I'd often forget how to write random characters (up to this day it happens - and I've written a lot of stuff). It's not a problem now because on a computer/phone I can type the pronunciation and I'd find what I wanted, but still.
FWIW, note that in the countries that used to be influenced by Chinese Han culture (Vietnam, Korea, Japan), they all used to have some form of Han character writing system, which then they subsequently switched (fully or partly) to a pronunciation based system. Outsiders rightly think we're nuts to keep the existing system, but it's just not gonna change.
I'm generally not a fan of the way people go about D&I, but the fact JeanHeyd has brought up the problem before makes it more pertinent.
Whoever on the Rust team made the decision to reach out and downgrade JeanHeyd's talk seems extremely incompetent.
Optics matter a lot here and a large portion of leadership roles is optics. It's careless to not take context into account, like the recent history of poor Rust-related optics (E.g. trademark thing) and JeanHeyd (The person they invited) talking about lack of black representation.
The media hates him, and I can understand how that can be hard to separate out from one's view of reality; but, I think whether Elon has success despite actually being terrible as some might think, or is actually really good at what he does, he's been very successful on the whole if you can be the slightest bit objective. So, given that, you would have to claim to know, really know, that it's all despite him to say he's ineffective, which is a pretty silly thing to propose unqualified.
Correlation != causation. It's clear that his success is in spite of himself, not because of it. I don't know anyone in my professional circle that would work under him, what with having a reputation for impulse firing people that disagree with you and other clear signs of egomania.
Considering him not is pretty dumb given the success of two independent companies under his leadership (spacex and tesla). Under his leadership both companies went from nothing to successful.
You can claim that all of the success is due to the other execs at those companies, but they are still his choices following his leadership. He has the power to fire any of them so they are clearly doing what he wants.
> You can be an effective leader with bad optics. See Elon musk.
I'd argue part of what made Musk's companies so successful was the optics - he was seen as a visionary, building the future - ergo customers and engineers alike wanted to associate with him.
Since the decline in his optics over the last few years, has he been an effective leader? Twitter does not seem to support that notion.
I think Musk is good at choose great lieutenants who believe in his vision. As a person he has turned into an awful individual. Lots of awful individuals have been great at business and running corps. I don't actually think he's all that talented as a day-to-day CEO
Choosing great lieutenants are actions related to effective leadership.
You may consider him to be a toxic and awful person but that is independent of him being an effective leader. For example, Hitler was an effective leader.
They actually speak to this somewhat (rting + acknowledging someone else's commentary on the issue mentioning the same) on Twitter. If you view their tweet history and linked tweet, you'll see that they speak a bit to the sorry state of representation at these conferences in general
I'm not disagreeing with your overall point, to be clear, but in my mind, leaving the burden of pointing out inequity to victims of it isn't great either. I guess a less problematic approach would be reaching out to that person directly to see if they feel like that's what happened, and how they'd like others to respond if so
> "a person of color" (as if white is not a color, but whatever)
You might want to look into the historical basis for this term before you make snarky comments about it. It comes across as dismissive. My understanding is the term "person of color" evolved from "colored" (which originally just meant black (in America at least)) and now encompasses non-white people.
"Colored" is now considered offensive by most, so why isn't "person of color" also viewed the same way? Both terms describe the same opressive system of nonsense racial hierarchy, after all.
It's complex but the reductionist explanation is that it is in part due to the euphemism treadmill, and in part etymological origin. "Colored" comes from the era of segregation, while "people of color" comes after.
But don't get too comfortable, as "people of color" will probably phase out soon as well. My money is first on "BIPOC" (as an initialism, usually sounding out the letters), giving way to "bipoc" (as an acronym, lower case, pronounced /baı-pok/). But I'm too white to make that call, just a guess based on linguistics patterns.
Even "BIPOC" is not without controversy. But afaik, no one has proffered an adequate word to describe "folks that have too much melanin to be considered white".
Of course it's necessary and desirable. The "categorization system" in question already exists, whether it ought to or not. Bipoc have a more difficult socioeconomic situation, because of their skin color. Should "LGBTQ+" as a category not exist, because they are people just like straight people?
It is useful and meaningful to talk about the plight and state of, and advocate for, "Group XYZ that has been marginalized and experienced systemic violence throughout history, specifically because they are XYZ"
It is transient and fleeting, and it has little to do with melanin. People of Jewish descent, Italians, and even the Irish, used to be considered non-white at various points in the last 100 years in the USA. People whose skin is almost white can still be considered black if, say, one of their grandparents was black. But people whose skin is dark at the end of the summer are nevertheless white as long as it turns pale during winter.
- Dark-skinned descendant of American slaves, living in the US
- Dark-skinned recent immigrant to US from Africa, whose parents were important government officials, and one of whose distant ancestors sold slaves to Europeans
- Descendant of Navajo Indians
- Descendant of indigenous Hawaiians
- Descendant of Japanese Hawaiians
- Decendant of Japanese immigrants from turn of 20th century, who were interned in a camp during the war
- Japanese immigrant who moved to US in 2005, for university
- Son of migrant Mexican farmworkers
- Descendant of conquistadores whose parents were top executives in a large Mexican corporation
- Lebanese Muslim immigrant
- Lebanese Christian immigrant
- And so on…
What interesting characteristic do these people all have in common, that "white" people don't also share? Absolutely nothing, other than that they don't tick the "non-Hispanic white" box on stupid USian forms.
I don't have a great answer to this other than "language evolves". Your comment could also be extended to other terms that have gone out of favor, such as "Negro" being replaced by "African American" and more recently "Black". I'm not a linguist nor a historian so I can't comment extensively on the "why" of this evolution.
“Person of color” can be found in legal documents going back to the early 1800’s. There’s no “evolution” here. It’s all for political purposes. “Colored people” became “black ”became “African Americans” became “Black” (capital B). “People of color” is more broad and used to form a progressive coalition against “whiteness”, or rather the Western European tradition. In fact you could argue PoC doesn’t include Blacks as BIPOC is the fresh term to convince non-white people and so-called “white allies” to organize together so as to obtain power against the white oppressors.
Yes, when you examine the history here it appears neurotic, paranoid, and divisive. But I’m sure a few people have been able to acquire a slice of power from exploiting it.
The rest of us will just continue to politely smile and nod and then roll our eyes and smirk as we turn away.
Can we not? That point you're picking on was one sentence in the post ("As my buddy Aman pointed out, the context that this would have also been the first keynote by a person of color at RustConf should not be lost here.")
Trying to expand it into a giant anti-anti-anti-woke frame is a little distasteful. Even if you're one of the people who thinks any discussion of race is racist, can't you just accept that some people view lack of diversity as a problem worth noting and leave it at that? It's evidence, right? Certainly "Rust has never had a non-white speaker" seems like a problem, even if it's not. It's not wrong to note it in passing in the context of another argument.
It was a small part of the post and I think it was explained fairly. It's part of the context, and they don't think it should be ignored. JeanHeyd doesn't have to have mentioned it (or even thought about it) for it to be considered relevant by someone else.
The behaviour is disrespectful regardless of colour, yes. But someone's skin colour does influence other people's behaviour.
"White" is rather emphatically not like other ethnic or racial labels. Throughout the history of the US, who counts as "white" has been redefined many times to suit the political goals of the people at the time. In the era of the founding fathers, the Irish, Spaniards, Italians, all considered not white. Then during various times, often driving by waves of immigration of some other ethnicity people were freaking out about, drive a process to include them in whiteness as allies against the new threat.
There's a great deal to read on this topic if you're genuinely interested. Otherwise I just want to warn you that the way you phrase this comes across as rather ignorant and stepping on the border of racism.
Not sure what that has to do with how, in today's US society, the 'White' vs 'PoC' labels and paradigm is used by an extremely divisive and toxic 'Us vs Them' mentality. Even when completely off-topic. Which the parent was making an obvious allusion to.
The fact that you even dared to threaten him with gross insinuations says a lot about you, or more broadly about the US in general.
I'm not from anywhere close to the US cultural sphere.
This aspect is one of the reasons I'm very uncomfortable with all the classification of people into races. There's always a hierarchy implied, even inside the white category, a ranking of more or less white, questionably or unquestionably white etc. It's not the world I want, I don't want to internalize these (unspoken) classifications of people.
It's not the world I want either but denying this is what exists in reality in some false appeal to "can't we just ignore race" is equivalent to saying to people who are currently discriminated against "suffer in silence."
You do what you want but I'm not going to do that.
Throughout the history of the world, who counts as XYZ has been redefined many times to suit the political goals of the people at the time.
I recall when we stopped being Yugoslavian, and started shooting at each other, as Serbs or Croats. The Russian guy sitting next me married a Ukrainian woman a decade ago. Recently Russians and Ukrainians started shooting at each other. There's a great deal to read on this topic if you're genuinely interested.
“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”
And you got it wrong. The Irish were not considered non-white. The ethnic divisions were (and are) most definitely not just White vs PoC. It used to be extremely important whether a person was a Catholic or a Protestant, for example, all other kinds of Christianity being conveniently ignored.
I liked JeanHeyd's blog because he is a good writer (but a bit on the chatty side). I also love what he does for the C standardization process. His skin colour is completely irrelevant.
I agreed with you up until you casually insinuated ChillBill is racist.
Like WTF? Rude. This is exactly the kind of behaviour ChillBill is talking about. Racism is a big deal. You can't just casually be throwing it in anywhere without backing up what you're saying.
What exactly did ChillBill say that borders on racism? Why does that step on the border if racism? Why are you that sure that you'd warn him/her/them?
I think your comment shows a level of ignorance on the matter that's not warranted. This is exactly what I'm talking about. You seem to genuinely care but you have not done enough work to understand the intricacies of the topic. It's a difficult one, and you don't have to if you don't want to, but to lecture me on my phrasing shows a deep level of ideological holding that you may have, I would advise you to listen/read more, and always steelman your arguments.
...Calling a PoC ignorant, lecturing them and imploring them to read about racism... whew...
Them having been on the other side of the saddle, I'd bet they're familiar. How about simply listening to what they have to say without instruction, seeing their perspective and taking it in?
I really don't think that is what is going on here. So far, all I have heard anyone say is "Behavior occurred which should have been unacceptable regardless of who it happened to. By the way, the optics are particularly bad because of race issues."
If you ignore the optics of the situation you are going to step in it big time, even if your intentions are completely honorable. You need to be aware of the optics of your behavior, because that's all outside observers see. Your intentions are not something other people have access to.
You going on the offensive like this on this particular point makes you look (see, optics again) either incredibly naïve or covering for some pretty bad behaviour.
My gosh no, this toxic - it is not up to people to have contextualise or defend their behaviour given others' sensitivities.
It is fundamentally bigoted to assume racism, and fundamentally up to people to provide at least some evidence or context if they suspect there is.
The commentor is not going on the offensive, rather the defensive, as someone else brought the issue up.
"makes you look (see, optics again) either incredibly naïve or covering for some pretty bad behaviour."
You have arbitrarily (and repulsively) accused a commenter of 'covering for some crime' - typical of the social justice fanaticism that otherwise empathic people have come to loathe - you may want to contemplate why you might say such a thing.
This isn't an issue of race, it's not particularly part of the dialogue, it's an issue of perceived slight and professional victimhood. Not everything is hyper intersectional.
"makes you look (see, optics again) either incredibly naïve or covering for some pretty bad behaviour."
It is point blank what you said, it's plainly ridiculous that you would deny what is right there as though we're misinterpreting it, this is repulsive gaslighting.
I love Rust but the ideological posturing and swathes of people who in their hearts are grifters is truly disappointing.
Framing a technical presentation you disagree with as "making you uncomfortable" in highly manipulative fashion definitely deserves to be called out in public.
Indeed it should not be surprising that the community (leadership) who from the outside seems among the most concerned with codes of conduct, inclusion and so on, is actually not so virtuous at all.
I am all for many of the stated goals of "woke" or whatever you want to call them, but it is really reminiscent of the politician who wants to ban porn but has his entire computer filled with it.
Everyone has similar character flaws, but insecurities and cognitive dissonance make some need to virtue signal because they fear the crowd will think they are intolerant and their brain can't deal with the fact they might have some lizard brain thoughts from time to time. To deal with this they go to the extent of branding themselves "good person walking here", uh, sorry: "allies".
What if there are people who need laws, rules, processes to keep something at bay because they are actually suffering from addiction to the very thing they need to regulate.
If they believe that thing is wrong and they see how hard it is to resist, they of all people may jump on a bandwagon.
Except people who involve themselves in dev communities aren't babies, and this parental impulse of protecting people from ideas YOU think are bad is completely toxic and self defeating.
Being afraid of disagreement is a cancer in our discourse.
I agree. I was suggesting something even worse: they have internal disagreement and guilt and are regulating others based on that. Any discourse makes them feel worse about it, so they regulate that too.
I haven't seen grifters in the community. But there definitely are narcissists and other ucky personality types. This is true of ALL communities... As soon as a niche group offers a position of power/importance the turds will line up to battle over it.
Best advice I have is, avoid the whole situation and have fun. If you really want this kind of stuff to be part of your career, this is what that kind of career path is... lots of politics, drama, defending a title, etc.
Conferences can be good for meeting people, and I guess self promotion. But it's just like anything else, there's going to be people who will do anything to meddle regardless of merit. There's going to be "cool kids" and "losers". If you seek equanimity, you won't find it in a hierarchical power structure.
this is well in line with the woke culture, everything is about feelings, and not rational arguments. They need trigger warnings, and if things hurt some feefee's, its simply unacceptable regardless of factual matters.
that is why it is so disruptive in a professional setting, and kills all real honest cooperation
This is an absurd post, these tirades against the boogeyman of “woke culture” are so tiresome. Engage with the content of the blog post instead of deferring to this tribal bullshit.
That _is_ the content of the post. It’s not like people are arguing about grammar or the webpage style. People are talking about the words the author used and the ideas the author communicated.
I think the framing of 'uncomfortable' is just a poor choice of words among a bunch of people it would seem have difficulty with these things. My gosh this is all out of proportion.
I really love Rust, and I'm very encouraged to see this "ideological posturing" happening in public.
There is a wide wide world out there, and just as having an easy to use crate system is important, so is having a large community. You don't get to a large community by being exclusive, but by being inclusive.
Don't think of it as an active act of creating exclusion, but of a state that just happened. Doesn't matter how, it could be completely natural, unintentional, and just how growth happened.
It is also almost certainly the case that nobody is being actively excluded (well except maybe from a keynote). But appearances matter, and why have a poor appearance that could come from a bad place when a better one is possible?
Continue on with the conference, learn from the current situation, and try again in the future.
That's why I'm encouraged that this conversation is happening, because it's the path to the better future.
The only really wrong response to this would be to shut down, close one's mind, and decide that the problem is the controversy itself, rather than the greater social situation of which this conference is just one small part. It's a programming language, it's not meant to solve social problems, after all. But governance and social structures are inherent to programming languages, and they should try to fit into the larger social structure of society (around the world) and if they want to be widely adopted, learn to appeal to wider and wider audiences.
But wouldn't the best way to appeal to a wider audience be to avoid the controversy and focus on the technical? We know how off-putting the drama can be, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36104163
> It's a programming language, it's not meant to solve social problems, after all.
But that's exactly what I'm saying as well. Not sure there's something to learn, that's what's confusing me here. Black people didn't attempt to speak at a Rust conference.
Well... OK? What's there to learn from that? As far as I'm aware, the Rust community is one of the most diversify-friendly ones out there already.
your second point seems trivial, after all let's assume that most of us live and act accordingly (manipulation is bad, and if there's something uncomfortable about a presentation, then it should be directly addressed, etc)
but your first seems very interesting. can you please elaborate on who these grifters are, and how to identify them?
According to the discussion in /r/rust/, one person falsely claimed that they were speaking on behalf of Rust team consensus and the RustConf representative they talked to got burned by taking their word for it rather than asking for confirmation.
I'm still trying to find confirmation of which message it was though. If it was the initial invite that was "issued without authorization", then the revocation would make more sense.
I've attended a few Rust conferences and events, and they have all been unusually politicized. There has been a very strong emphasis on how inclusive the community is, which raises some red flags. It is akin to someone repeatedly expressing how smart or funny they are... it makes you wonder why. I was waiting for something like this to happen.
I agree. I've been scolded before by saying how unwelcoming the "Rust community" can be, and everyone comes out of the woodwork to say how inclusive it is. They're not the same thing. All of this is childish drama, around a _programming language_. Strange...
It seems to be a recurring problem with Rust (the ecosystem, not the language). One of the nice things about the Kotlin and Java communities is that they lack this kind of endless drama. Technical events stay technical.
I agree with this 100%. As soon as you bring in outside topics, this kind of thing is inevitable. Rust should be about Rust. Whatever your personal beliefs are about BLM, abortion, the existence of aliens, whatever - putting any energy into external topics detracts from what should be the primary focus.
The Rust™ community is only welcoming and inclusive to those that completely agree with everything their monoculture believes. Any deviation will paint you as a heretic worthy of being condemned or burned at the stake like a witch.
I've been to plenty of conferences over the years, and I never really knew who was a "keynote speaker" or "only" a "speaker". Does anyone pay attention to this?
You give a talk. People show up. They clap at the end. Does it really matter what some title on some conference website is? The communication was perhaps a bit more confusing and hectic than it should have been, but does that really matter? Is that really a big deal?
I don't even understand why anyone would overly care about this in the first place, and now it's also an example of systemic bias against black people, "cruel", and "heartless"?
If the talk had been outright cancelled: sure, what would have been a right dick move. But from what I can see all that happened is that the "status" (that I don't think many pay attention to) got "downgraded" and (maybe) moved to a different timeslot. I'm just confused why this would spark such strong reactions.
The people who don't think this is a big deal are either lacking some empathy or don't understand how conferences work. The equivalent situation is something like being warmly invited to a wedding, which you accept. The bride and groom then spend time gushing over how great it is that you'll be there, telling everyone they know, insisting that you book tickets right away. Later, you're told you can only come to the ceremony and not the reception or party.
In short, it's hard not to feel like you just got baited and switched, even if the withdrawal is for a good reason. "But you'll still be at the ceremony!" isn't a good argument because that wasn't the original invitation, and because you're putting them in a very uncomfortable position having to decide whether to continue to go or not.
For context, I've spoken at over 100 conference events. There are very significant differences in terms of the keynote speakers and regular speakers — generally in compensation, status, time, and prominence, at least for conferences that are larger than community events. Not all of these may not be obvious to attendees, but overall it's a fairly serious snub to pull the rug out from under someone like this.
It's up to you how you deal with stuff like this: you either turn everything in to a big drama or you just accept that these things are a part of life and can happen because the universe is a chaotic place. It's not like they lost their job or something; it's just a 2-day event.
If adding some perspective makes me "lacking empathy" then so be it, but I resent the accusation. We can also turn that around: the organisers are essentially being called a bunch of cruel racist assholes here, all without any real evidence. I bet that's fun after an honest mistake, miscommunication, or mismatch of expectations. If we want to talk empathy then no is coming off well here.
> We can also turn that around: the organisers are essentially being called a bunch of cruel racist assholes here, all without any real evidence.
You're getting evidence directly from someone who is a senior member of the Rust community and who participated directly in the original decision.
Imagine you hear a series of bangs, walk into your living room, and see Alice holding a smoking gun and standing over Bob's bullet-ridden dead body, holding a note saying "I wish Bob was dead".
One response is "well, we don't know what Bob did or if Alice actually pulled the trigger". Another response is "um, Alice, can you explain why you seem to have shot Bob?", and if Alice doesn't want to explain anything, you might start to draw inferences. But either way you might not want to hang around Alice until it gets cleared up.
It's a very clearly disgruntled senior member of the community who has just ragequit, following which they wrote a lament about their broken heart and their copious weeping over the intolerable cruelty of a withdrawn keynote invitation. It might be worth asking for a bit of evidence of their claims, given their penchant for melodramatic overstatement.
> It's a very clearly disgruntled senior member of the community who has just ragequit
That’s leaving out the important context that it’s just the latest in a string of senior members in that community who have been disgruntled enough to quit. The entire moderation team quit all at the same time. Since then the leadership team has been “an interim leadership”.
Rust governance has been an ongoing shitshow for at least several years.
As someone who’s not directly affected since I stay well out of “the community” I’m less concerned about “community drama”, but as someone who makes (and will be held responsible for) long term strategic technical decisions for my company I can’t help but wonder if I want to hitch my company (and my reputation) to a language run by the sort of people who’ve let this drama fester for so long. Is some language feature going to be voted on, implemented, publicised, become a critical dependency in my codebase - only to get rugpulled by some anonymous core team member like this keynote speaker? I mean, probably not, but Rust leadership sure as hell haven’t done anything to earn my trust and seem to actively be working toward eroding it. In ways that I’ve never even had to question to myself about the leadership of Perl or Python, or even Java.
Well other languages are just programing languages, they are not virtuous like Rust. And I am not just overstating it. In so many contexts Rust people come swinging at whoever not using or competing with Rust, are not just making bad technical choice (still debatable) but morally lacking.
Just being "up close" doesn't mean your perspective is objective truth, or even reasonable. If anything, quite the opposite. The author of this post seems emotionally invested and may very well be ascribing motives to people that simply don't exist, and/or may have a coloured view of events.
On an object level it's not a big deal, but you're not thinking about it with the correct framing.
Being invited as a keynote speaker lends you credibility and status. It means you have been acknowledged as someone worthy of giving a keynote. You may not care about this, but other people do.
To downgrade someone from a keynote speaker to regular speaker is extremely disrespectful. Especially someone that you invited.
It makes it seem like you are toying with this person, and based on JT's account someone on the Rust team was toying with JeanHeyd because they went behind the rest of the team's back to downgrade his talk.
It's like giving a child a toy then snatching it back. It's just cruel. Whether it was a mistake or not doesn't change that.
> It's not like they lost their job or something; it's just a 2-day event.
One wrinkle I haven't seen called out is whether this was a paid speaking event (I assume it was) and if the demotion came with a part cut. If there was a pay cut that pretty shitty IMO, and does get a bit closer to losing ones job.
This goes both ways though? The organizers also turned this into a big drama and could have instead chosen to just chill and accept there was going to be a keynote some of them didn't love.
> The equivalent situation is something like being warmly invited to a wedding
> ...
> Later, you're told you can only come to the ceremony and not the reception or party For context, I've spoken at over 100 conference events.
Is it though? I can tell you from an audience point of view it almost certainly isn't. Nobody cares very much what "status, time, and prominence" your talk has. Which leads me to ...
> There are very significant differences in terms of the keynote speakers and regular speakers — generally in compensation, status, time, and prominence
So it's an ego thing?
Just give the talk, forego whatever glory you get from it.
It's a respect thing. It costs time and money to produce and give a talk.
That very often isn't visible to the audience. It takes weeks of dedicated preparation to deliver a high-quality keynote talk, and people have day jobs and other obligations. If they're going to travel hundreds or thousands of miles and now have to pay for the privilege, they might want to not be treated as disposable.
People often get time off of work or school to be honored with formal talking gigs. IE your boss will let you off the hook to prepare for it because it makes your company/school look good. It'd be pretty embarrassing to have to explain to your boss or your PI that "oops I'm no longer a key note speaker"
It’s like being center stage on the PR poster for the movie and then only being an extra.
Like, being invited to perform on the main stage of the concert with your band, and then later being told you’ll have to perform from side stage 3 instead.
The audience is confused, and the whole thing is just disrespectful, yeah.
The thing itself is not the problem, performing on stage 3 by itself would be fine. It’s the disrespect and incompetence implied by the switch from one to the other.
I understand social dynamics, I just don't respect them.
You can count all the "social dynamics" points you like, but it won't change how I treat what you've said, or how I push what I'm saying. Your statements will be judged on merit.
I haven't been to a conference in years because of COVID, but I've been to plenty mainly web and Python related before.
Almost all of them had keynote speakers, who received a prominent spot, usually in the morning and on multi-tier conferences the only talk scheduled at that time slot. Based on content of most of those talks the expectation was to take a wider or deeper or just different look at our fields and not mainly present a smaller idea or solution.
But it also doesn't matter if you or I personally do or don't care about distinction. There is one made clearly and as soon as it is made, there is an implicit promotion or demotion depending on which way a person is being moved and one should have very good reasons to demote anyone publicly as they did here.
I'm not saying the process was brilliant, but there's a difference between "the organizers were chaotic, didn't have their shit together, and need to do better" and "the organizers intentionally acted cruelly in an act of racist vindictiveness out of sheer malice".
That's really my main objection to this post; and in the context of the accusations it makes the change of title is not really a big deal, or so it seems to me anyway.
Or to put it this way: if it was me I probably would have been a bit disappointed, but I would also assume that's just the chaos of things.
But like I said in my other comment: I suspect this is really about general dissatisfaction with the Rust team, and that this is merely the final straw: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36102292
> “the organizers intentionally acted cruelly in an act of racist vindictiveness out of sheer malice“
The characterisation of those actions as vindictive seems accurate, but I don’t think the blog post is stating that the actions were racist, rather that it was a missed opportunity to represent the wider population at rustconf.
Whether you think that’s good or tokenisation is a separate matter, the point is that the article is not claiming that downgrading the speaker was racism.
The sentence "Systems have memory and biases. If the people that make up the system don't work to fight against these, they are perpetuated" in particular came off as more than merely "missed opportunity", although "racism" is probably too strong of a word too, but I don't know of anything else that fits better.
Either way, I don't really see why it would be vindictive either? Maybe I missed some information somewhere, but I've seen nothing that would indicate anything other than the most likely explanation: they rescheduled because they assumed JeanHeyd just didn't care as he indicated he didn't want to do a keynote at first, some petty infighting, and all of this communicated this in a bad and chaotic way.
It is funny because at least for me personally, it is the other way around.
I am most interested in deeper technical talks (or cool lightning talks that broaden my horizons) and keynotes often feel like highlevel generic talks that are very skippable - often aimed at CTOs and not engineers. Also, "prominent spot in the morning" is exactly the opposite for me as well, because conferences are all about networking and evening networking means hangover ...
In that sense I loved the Ruby conferences where the keynote was commonly matz or tenderlove talking about some crazy deep problem ruby was tackling about memory, jit, or speed tradeoffs.
Sadly haven't been to one in years since they haven't come back to SG
Do most people care if someone was a keynote speaker? No(Outside of academia). Is it a big deal if your talk was selected as a speaker or keynote speaker? No. But should you care if your talk is demoted from Keynote to non-keynote without following due process(and possibly because of personal biases)? Yes.
I don't know anything about any of the parties involved, but I feel like declining the talk was the correct thing to do and raising the lack of due process is also the correct thing to do.
There is obviously some legit cred here, and it's a definite downgrade - but it's not being sent to the woods either. G
Given that 'nobody else cares at all, whatsoever' - that adds context to this which we should include in our understanding. Nobody is missing grant money, or getting a stain on their resume, not getting a job, publicly dragged, meaning the slight is ultimately very personal.
There is a legit grievance here, but it's overstated.
Most gripes have a kernel of truth, the issue is to match up the size of the truth, with the size of the kernel.
If nobody cared then why did someone make such a big deal out of the talk making them uncomfortable and therefore needing to downgrade it. It obviously did matter to more than just the speaker.
You're not speaking for everyone. I care about the Rust leadership behaving properly for example, because issues like this may be a sign of other problems with respecting the community. And I would like to trust them to resolve issues fairly and quickly since I will rely on the project's progress in the future and don't want people leaving because of mishandling social issues.
You get an invite to a conference as a keynote speaker, which is then rescinded, for no good reason even? That's a big deal. I don't know about "heartless" and all that emotional stuff, it's just plain disrespectful.
You make up your mind about that kind of stuff BEFORE the invitation.
Usually a keynote speaker is invited, and gets his travel and hotel costs reimbursed. Without reimbursement you usually think twice if you visit a conference or not. And I never heard of downgrading a speaker before, even if I heard of plenty of conference drama before.
A regular slap in the face is not doing you any physical harm. If anything, it may even improve your blood circulation. So, if you saw someone slapped in the face, would you be confused "why this would spark such strong reactions"?..
I did that would have to depend on what the strong reactions were in that case. There are reactions to someone getting slapped in the face that I would consider to be overreactions.
Giving a keynote is being honoured by the event organisers. You've been specifically invited to talk. You're the headliner of the event.
It may not matter to you as a listener, but I expect it would matter to you if you were asked to give such a talk.
To have that taken away because you voiced a technical opinion some people didn't agree with is petty and childish. It wasn't even a political opinion, and it was public before he was voted on and invited.
This reasoning makes no sense. If keynote and a regular talk are not meaningfully different why did Rust leadership switch it?
If it's purely ego then there are even more serious concerns if ego dominants an entire conference organising committee then withdrawal was the only reasonable option.
For the uninitiated, a keynote sets a theme and tone for a series of talks.
Usually it's less technical and more personal than later talks. Explaining the significance of the topic that will be discussed in upcoming talks.
You've been to more than me then so what am I talking about, but I always understood it to be the one talk given to kick things off or maybe conclude, i.e. nothing else is going on at the same time, 'everyone' is listening (or else skipping it).
Maybe it's just been watered down to 'featured'/'sponsored'/'recommended' talk? I haven't been aware of that.
It depends on the conference; sometimes it's something like "creator of the language shares their vision for the next five years", other times it's "talk from the most famous person we could book", and sometimes just "the talk we liked best from a relatively unknown person". If there are multiple tracks then sometimes the keynote will be the only talk for the timeslot, other times it's not.
Looking at the schedule for this conference, it seems that there's just a single track and all talks are 30 minutes. I wouldn't expect any substantial changes beyond a different timeslot and title.
At the very least I would expect a keynote to be more inspiring, interesting, groundbreaking and possibly a little less technical/routine. It would be a different speech with a different preparation. So there is that. Plus
bragging rights on CV and what people think of you and how many people turn up, how big the hall is etc. I think I would be annoyed to be downgraded.
I'd love to hear from someone who could outline the distinction between the two.
I could certainly believe that it means the difference between the amount of attendees, length of presentation, venue, etc etc. In those cases, it's quite a big deal and quite the dick move, especially given the seemingly unilateral process to "downgrade" the presentation.
It's possible, but those weren't mentioned unless I missed something. The keynote was "start of the day, shared slot with somebody else, 30 minutes".[1] No mention of different length after the change, but I would assume it will mean a different timeslot.
I think what happened is just the regular chaos, hub-hub, and disagreements that's involved with organising these things; since JeanHeyd himself already indicated he wasn't sure he wanted to give keynote the organisers probably figured it didn't matter much to him. Classic expectation mismatch. For reasons that are not entirely clear to me JeanHeyd assumed "somebody is pulling very weird strings behind the scenes", "shadowy decisions that are non-transparent", and "vindictive behavior". The best explanation I can come up with for that is that this is not so much about this talk, but rather expressing general unhappiness with the Rust leadership, and this is merely the "the final straw". But who knows...
> just the regular chaos, hub-hub, and disagreements that's involved with organising these things
I dunno about you, but when I’m organizing these things the subject matter experts that you invite to take part are more important than the paying guests.
I would absolutely not invite them until I was 100% certain they’d have a spot. If something goes wrong there, it’d be either an extensive excuse or simply 3 keynotes.
It depends from conference to conference, but generally speaking "keynote" means:
- The very first or very last talk of the day.
- A larger time slot, looking at the Rustconf 2022 schedule, keynotes are 45 minutes long, regular talks 30 minutes. https://2022.rustconf.com/schedule
- The speaker is featured much more prominently in the promotional materials.
- If the conference has multiple tracks, no other talk are scheduled at the same time than keynotes. It's assumed all conference attendees will hear the keynote.
It's funny, I have this same "who cares?" prior about it being a keynote, but draw the opposite conclusion. A simple disclaimer that the idea's appearance in a keynote doesn't imply that it will land in the language would have sufficed. It's just a talk, it's fine.
This is certainly strangely phrased. The version I got from another member was that the content of the talk was to be about a proposed feature that may not actually end up in Rust (in my view it likely would not), and having that be the keynote talk would imply to a lot of people that it would end up in Rust and put the language in an uncomfortable position where something other than the feature's merit would be pushing for its inclusion. Moving the talk away from being a centerpiece, in such a case, makes sense, and I have no idea whether this counts as poorly handled or not but saying it shouldn't have happened at all seems a bit naïve to me.
That may be completely true and a justifiable reason to change the decision, but it also is largely irrelevant. Preferably such concerns should have been raised prior to the vote. If they were and the vote was still to issue the invitation then that should have been the end of it. If it wasn't raised prior to the vote such concerns should have been brought back to the voting body and a re-vote taken. The decision of that vote should have them been the final word. Instead the decision of the voting body was subverted. That is the main issue.
> and having that be the keynote talk would imply to a lot of people that it would end up in Rust and put the language in an uncomfortable position
People inviting the author knew about the content and the author double checked if they're ok with that direction. This wasn't a surprise or something missed. The original vote was done by enough people who can make the decisions.
I would love if every language conference included a segment dedicated to “language ideas” where the expectation is that these ideas are unlikely to land but are fruitful to explore.
If you had taken 2 seconds to look up the history of this, you would find that the person who was going to give the keynote already brought up these concerns with rust leadership and was cleared to talk on the topic anyways.
Agree. They should’ve allowed for more discussion before sending invitations and more effort should've been made to come to a mutually beneficial solution. But going from an invited keynote (great honor) to an invited talk (honor) is not what I would call a deliberate attempt to "disgrace one of the experts in my field." It’s a single track conference where the speaker would be heard by all attendees and could’ve championed his ideas to the larger Rust community.
How petty are you as a person if you disregard your peers and screw someone over just because you're "uncomfortable" with a technical article?
Can we just stop with this intolerance of differing opinions? It's OK to disagree with someone. We don't need to all share the same opinions. Why the fuck would you have a conference if not to inject some healthy discourse in your community?
Also you are allowed to call that out AT THE CONFERENCE. In my field conference talks always have a Q and A. Sometimes people get completely shredded (in a tactful professional way) during a Q and A. If it's something you disagree with ask questions. This is someone willing to put their reputation on the line to say something, they've been vetted, voted on, made arrangements, etc. If they are wrong well that's what peer review is for, and working as a team is for.
Also how can someone be « uncomfortable » about a technical article? You can disagree, you can dislike it, you can even think it’s stupid, but uncomfortable? Wtf
Once on a conference one guy gave a talk about how he overrode python's module loading to load them from a mongodb instance. The reason was, if I remember correclty, because "it was easier for the juniors".
It made me veeeeeeeeery uncomfortable. Still a very good talk.
All of this drama / culture war or whatever you want to call it is a big part of what turned me off to Rust in the first place.
I come from .NET background and am open to the idea of a realistic C/C++ replacement. My experience with .NET and its "community" has left me with a really comfortable feeling with regard to my ability to do business, just "get shit done", etc. To be clear, there isn't really a community. I think that's why you don't hear a whole lot of drama come out of it. It's more of a LARP where we pretend we have some kind of say and sometimes Microsoft's leadership agrees and it looks like we participated openly. Most on HN hate this, but when you are trying to build a stable B2B product and signing 5+ year contracts, it's a goddamn paradise to not have concerns about what angry corners of social media might be up in arms about today.
I mean the .NET community/org is no stranger to drama and controversal moves by some team members which gets discussed over several weeks on HN, blocks, Twitter and elsewhere. For example, I vividly remember this:
Well, Microsoft itself is using Rust now, in the Windows kernel no less. If they reverse that decision, then we have cause for concern. Otherwise, I'm sure this will all blow over.
Basically taking the transformation that made sports into sports computer games and running it in reverse on computer RPGs so you get people in costume in the park throwing colored balls at each other to "cast spells".
Not really my thing, but a great way to get more fresh air and exercise if you're into RPGs.
The Rust community (in aggregate; I'd hope I wouldn't need to state the obvious that it doesn't apply to all individuals, but...Rust community) fosters this sort of melodrama.
There is a core of extremely zealous "Rust wins all the things" types who don't stop at advocating for a language on its technical merits: they have to belittle and berate users of other languages because their choice (or not: employment is what it is) isn't "correct." The Rust community has (a well deserved, in my opinion) reputation.
Its just so odd to me. It used to be that a language was like an impartial technology that could be evaluated. Back in the day would anybody ever say "wow those C++ people are noxious, I'm not going to use objects".
Sadly yes, it's not a new thing. Lisp is a good example of an old language that attracted a very particular community around it that did put some people off.
Guess, now that I think about it, Python and the 'white' spaces was kind of drama. But think it was still about technical merits, like do you prefer that style or not, don't remember the 'community' being melodramatic.
Putting all the drama aside, "clearspaces" would be better, no? What if my editors background is black? Then whitespaces would stand out like white bars.
> It used to be that a language was like an impartial technology that could be evaluated.
In the era of open source and package managers, this can only be an illusion. It's sort of possible to ignore the community, but if nothing else it will affect the volume and quality of packages available for you. That said, you can keep it pretty minimal, you don't really need to interact beyond reading docs and downloading packages.
Just search "rust" in HN comments (or on Reddit, or pretty much anywhere you see someone asking questions likely to invoke discussion about language choice): you'll find plenty.
I knew the people who come up with a compiler and syntax which just screams drama would also love drama in their real lives. That's why I stick with Go. No drama syntax, no drama conferences.
I was with you until this part:
>It was JeanHeyd who called Rust out for having no Black representation among Rust conference speakers. Rightly so, as both the Rust organization and the conferences had little to no Black representation.
Am I the only one that considers such arbitrary "diversity enforcement policy" horribly racist?
No organisation should be "called out for a lack of - insert-race-here- representation unless that organisation is in fact discriminatory. No one should be discouraged, relegated, skipped for mentoring or removed from a membership or a leadership role in an organisation because that person is the wrong race. Regardless of the reason why you feel that race is wrong. Calling out a group "for lack of Black representation" is basically telling every single non-Black member of that group they are less valuable because of the color of their skin.
People are not exchangeable units whose defining feature is the color of their skin. How can intelligent people not see this kind of thinking leads to the worst of social divisions?
Personally, I was with the author until that quote. If I was a member of that organisation I too would not be OK being represented by a person that makes such horribly offensive personal opinions known regardless of their technical expertise.
> No organisation should be "called out" for a lack of - insert-race-here- representation unless that organisation is in fact discriminatory.
I don't think you're being very reasonable here. A lack of diversity is just a piece of data: it might be complete coincidence, or it might be related to some underlying bias or discrimination. "Calling out" a lack of diversity is just bringing attention to that piece of data. If you want to ignore it, fine. If you want to make a case that the lack of diversity isn't a problem and/or has nothing to do with bias, by all means do so. But you can't just tell people to shut up about inconvenient facts until discrimination is proved in a court of law (or to your own satisfaction, or whatever unstated burden of proof you think is sufficient).
Free speech and dissent is important. You might not like it when people point out obvious and available data like "hey, this group seems to be pretty homogeneous", but that doesn't mean those people should shut up.
> A lack of diversity is just a piece of data: it might be complete coincidence, or it might be related to some underlying bias or discrimination.
I say it's a coincidence. I've known racist people but they were an overwhelming minority and had no power. Let's stop there. Find me a systemic racist in a position of power where I work or participate in local events and I promise I'll fight to eject them from their place of power. Done. Discussion should be over at this point: let's have actionable steps. We don't have them? Let's do something else.
"Might be related to some underlying bias or discrimination" is not a convincing thing to say. Going witch-hunting for witches that are 90% likely to not even exist is unproductive. The Sun's magnetic storms might influence our moods, that too falls in the "it might" category, but I don't base my life decisions on it.
> "Calling out" a lack of diversity is just bringing attention to that piece of data
A lot of people have been "bringing up attention" to many things. What are you doing to help? I had a few technical talks held in my city and in one occasion I insisted the discussion after the talk be in English and not my native tongue because we had just two English-speaking participants in the audience. I am helping in practical terms. Are you helping practically?
Many people in more privileged countries are completely blind to the fact that "raising awareness" is being done ever since the 1970s yet very little progress has been made in many areas (happily racism and sexism were reduced, which is good!). When are you going to understand that somebody at one point should actively do something about the problems and stop "raising awareness" until the heat death of the Universe?
Many people are quite aware of a ton of problems, believe me. I go outside and talk to people of many nationalities and races. The people willing to do something outside virtue-signalling are very few and far between though, sadly. And you strike me as a virtue-signaller.
I realize my tone is a bit combative but honestly, it's getting tiring and at one point I find it hard to talk entirely calmly when the other side of the discussion is content to only repeat the same things like a broken record.
He is saying there weren't any black speakers. Sure we can say how that should grow "organically", as some other poster did. But what if year in year out it doesn't happen? Maybe there aren't any black people in the Rust community and if they stepped forward with some good talks they would just be invited? Or maybe the situation is a little more complicated.
On the one hand you have your "diversity enforcement policy" which is arguably racist. On the other hand you have black Rust developers but never any black speakers or organization leaders (in a community which doesn't hesitate to toot their diversity horn) which also arguably racist. So what gives?
>Personally, I was with the author until that quote. If I was a member of that organisation I too would not be OK being represented by a person that makes such horribly offensive personal opinions known regardless of their technical expertise.
You could ask yourself why something that someone else might see as a simple (minor) disagreement caused such as strong reaction in you.
What is the average level of commitment and capability of <T> in the overall community?
If that is low relative to the community distribution members of <T> may not feel comfortable seeking speaker slots simply because they understand their relative ranking and do not want to potentially disrespect the group or humiliate themselves.
This is completely normal behavior for all <T>. Even in large subgroup most people do not consider themselves worthy of speaking at top conferences.
Then the intersection between "Black people" and "people willing to speak on a Rust conference" is extremely small and nothing can be done about it. Well, nothing that's not already being done I mean: like encourage everyone to be in these circles because nobody is going to show you the door for doing so, and nobody is going to discriminate you.
What else should one programming language foundation be doing? They are not a world government that can and should fight systemic racism. They can only encourage people to participate. Which they already do.
> You could ask yourself why something that someone else might see as a simple (minor) disagreement caused such as strong reaction in you.
Throwing the ball at each others' hands is never gonna achieve anything. I can try answering for your parent poster: because the average white people are getting sick of being blamed of being racist while a lot of places are being racist towards them because they are white and somehow the problems of racism worldwide are our fault.
I've never in my life discriminated anyone on any race or gender grounds and I also don't plan to ever do so. But constantly guilt-tripping whites that they should "fight for more representation" is not how you win them over for your cause. You only alienate them. Tell me this: "please never exclude people from conferences based on skin color and gender" and I'll immediately agree with you, we shake hands and the world became slightly better. But tell me "it's a little more complicated" without giving any context or explanation while still implying it's somehow my fault that there are no Black speakers on a Rust conference, and you definitely have lost me for your cause. I might even start fighting against you, if I allow my monkey brain to take over that is, which I actively strive to not do.
Now, you ask yourself why did you try to shift blame. It's toxic. We can all be better than this. Let's start somewhere already. We got so much more in common than you seem to think.
Or, if I completely misconstrued your comment then I am truly sorry. But I do get pissed off every now and then. We should all just stop blaming people for things that 95% of the time are just not there. :(
>Then the intersection between "Black people" and "people willing to speak on a Rust conference" is extremely small and nothing can be done about it.
Perhaps. That is an explanation that fits your worldview. But whether it is true is not so easily determined.
>I've never in my life discriminated anyone on any race or gender grounds and I also don't plan to ever do so. But constantly guilt-tripping whites that they should "fight for more representation" is not how you win them over for your cause. You only alienate them.
In your view _you_ and many other white people have never discriminated anyone and you have never witnessed it and therefore there is no racism. And that might very well be true (except for the last part, racism is obviously still out there).
But let's imagine a country with people living in it. Some can afford to go to university and some are poor and cannot. Now the university is not to blame for their lack of funds. They can truthfully claim that nobody who has sufficient means will be turned away. Also the majority of those poor people are white. The university simply says, we are not discriminating against any whites, they simply don't have any money! And this is also true. But they could also offer some scholarship which would greatly benefit some people who can't afford to go to university.
It seems you and parent are interpreting someone saying, there aren't any black people in your conferences and you should take a look at that, as saying: there aren't any black people and you are to blame for this and you are racist. Maybe some are actually saying this. But this (people being racist) doesn't need to be the case and I hope my example sheds some light on this. This is what I meant with the situation can might be complicated.
I think indeed as you said we don't need to blame people so much. Instead we can try to look beyond blame, and beyond our own perspective, and see that even without us being racist or doing anything wrong, there can be some injustice and the situation can be improved. Then if we throw our hands up and say well we ain't the government that is one thing, but being against someone else's initiative that may improve the situation is another.
> In your view _you_ and many other white people have never discriminated anyone and you have never witnessed it and therefore there is no racism.
You just demonstrate how hard it is to discuss with you because NOBODY SAID THAT. I even included pieces of context in my parent (and other) comment(s) and you still ignored it.
Racism and various other discriminatory actions absolutely exist. Why do you accuse people of lack of basic common sense? Do you think you'll make allies this way?
And finally, why is the Rust Foundation the place to try and fight stuff all over the world? It comes across as opportunism; previously oppressed people using any and all channels as a megaphone. Rust Foundation is inclusive which is already HUGE progress. Can we leave it at that and move on? I wanna be back to a programming language foundation, being, you know, a PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE FOUNDATION.
Outrageous, I know. Surely I will again be made to look like I am the ultimate nemesis of... somebody.
> and see that even without us being racist or doing anything wrong, there can be some injustice and the situation can be improved.
I am asking again: what does that have to do at all with the Rust Foundation? It's a programming language foundation, not a world-wide charity fund-raiser that aims to eliminate all exclusivity around the world.
IMO let's get our scopes right first. Otherwise all discussion flies out the window, as has been evident throughout the several threads made on this topic on HN already.
There’s lots that could be done that don’t fall in to your description of affirmative action.
Invitations could be extended to people to submit proposals for a talk. This already happens, but maybe the circle gets expanded once it’s evident that the circle has been too small. The simple act of asking is often enough to make people feel welcome.
I also call BS on the claim that you’ve never discriminated against someone. No person is a saint like that. Every human and sentient creature has inherent biases.
Maybe you’ve never actively discriminated, but you most surely have passively done so at some time in your life. For anyone to claim they are perfect in this regard is only fooling one’s self.
That you then go on to say that it’s not there 95% of the time withoit any actual reflection on the matter perhaps shows that you’re not well versed enough in the dynamics of race and gender relations to make that call.
I see where you're coming from and it's clear you have strong feelings on this matter. However, I believe there might be a misunderstanding here. The goal of diversity initiatives isn't about devaluing any particular group, it's about ensuring that the opportunities and benefits are more equitably distributed across different communities.
When someone mentions a 'lack of Black representation', they're not saying that non-Black members are less valuable because of their skin color. Rather, they're highlighting that there appears to be a systemic issue preventing people of that particular race from participating or advancing in that space. By addressing these systemic issues, we can make organizations more inclusive and more representative of the broader community.
Nobody is suggesting that people are exchangeable units defined solely by their skin color. On the contrary, it's recognized that everyone is unique and has a diverse set of skills, experiences, and perspectives to contribute.
This does not mean discarding merit or reducing people to their race, but rather acknowledging that societal, cultural, and systemic barriers have created unequal access to opportunities. The ultimate goal is to ensure that everyone, regardless of their race, has an equal opportunity to succeed.
When were these supposed "systemic issues" ever identified? In my experience "systemic racism" is a vague pretext to implement racist policies that push out white people (and sometimes Asians) in favor of black people (and people considered "brown enough"). I see this at my job and at conferences: people are explicitly promoted or selected as speakers in part because they are not white (or not male). This isn't just something I observed, they say it openly when the "diversity", equity, and "inclusion" strategy is discussed. I've also seen conference attendees openly say that there should be fewer white males at a certain event.
In none of those cases was a specific policy or practice identified that would explain the existence of "systemic issues" preventing minorities from getting hired, promoted, selected, and that would justify implementing discriminatory policies (aka "affirmative action"). So ironically we're discriminating against the "majority" (white males) over something that's mostly imaginary, at least in the US tech industry, based on nothing but demographic statistics. The fact that there's fewer qualified people of a certain color (proportionally to overall demographics) in the pool isn't evidence of systemic racism at the level we're operating. Meanwhile you would get laughed at for suggesting that we need gender parity in waste management jobs, or early childhood education.
There are actually lots of initiatives to increase gender diversity in early childhood education.
Also systemic bias exists. That’s not an arguable point because the US has a history of anti-black rules like red lining that affect opportunities till this day. Or rules like how women could manage their funds that held women back. Other countries similarly had rules like that against various demographics.
Things are better but generational issues still exist. The history of these things isn’t even so far ago that most millennials would be somehow unaffected.
I don't disagree that historical systemic discrimination has effects that lasts generations and I'm not against affirmative action when applied carefully, but I think it's presumptuous and counterproductive to try to "counterbalance" a perceived systemic bias that occurred in the past at one level (for example in education), today at another level (employment or public speaking opportunities).
Equal opportunity was the right idea and technologies like the Internet helped equalize the playing field to the point that socio-economic background matters less than ever. Now we're regressing back to judging people first and foremost based on their skin color, sex, and even sexual orientation. I see my company's DEI leader making shameless statements saying that they will make sure to promote more "people from underprivileged groups" (that means people who are not white or Asian by their own definition) with no apparent regard for performance or merit. It's racist to a comical degree.
The internet doesn’t equalize things like hiring and conference representation though. Imho it’s a complete non sequitur to this discussion about the real world.
I think assuming that the anonymity afforded by the internet extends to real life is naive.
The Internet gives you unparalleled access to information. There's virtually no barrier to learn about a subject you're interested in, especially software-related. You don't even have to be able to travel to a public library nowadays, which is what I did as a kid, reserving time slots on public computers to access the Internet. It's easier than ever to teach yourself a skill like programming, as well as build a portfolio through open source contributions, and that certainly directly translates to work and public speaking opportunities.
Yes. I'm pretty sure I've been judged for every single one of my identifiable immutable characteristics. For my skin color, out loud in the street, for sure when I lived in a place where I was the minority.
> and denied opportunities
Do you mean directly, aside from that conference where white males were told to attend less, or my employer openly favoring people who are neither white nor Asian in upper ranks? If so no, no one has told me that I couldn't do something specifically because I'm white. Have you? In what circumstances? And was it an isolated event or evidence of a systemic problem?
Told to attend less because there needed to be space for other demographics? That’s not discrimination because it’s not preventing white men from attending, it’s just allowing other people to also attend unless you believe that you’re also somehow better than everyone who was allowed to attend.
the same goes for favouring people in your job. If you have a systemic issue in your place of work, then report it.
But otherwise people are chastising the person in question for pointing out that there isn’t diversity in representation. So what? They’re not meant to even mention what they think is an issue because somehow the systems are just and fair because of the internet???
Anyway I won’t be responding further. I don’t think you actually care about understanding or supporting equality, or letting other people prosper if they’re not your demographic.
The fact that you think the internet is an equalizer of opportunity just shows how people here don’t actually want to understand the issues people in other demographics go through.
Edit: ah and of course the reply below is it’s the minorities fault they’re not represented enough. This is why I don’t care to respond to people who are so deeply rooted in the idea that the world is somehow a just and fair representation. It’s the same argument for decades.
I'm sorry but discouraging white males from attending a conference has approximately nothing to do with "allowing other people to also attend". It's a weird brand of discrimination (racism and sexism) based on the unfounded idea that any coveted group must have a racial and sexual profile equivalent to that of an arbitrary overall population. Additionally, there would be no need to exclude people on the basis of their race and sex if the minorities they'd like to include simply participated in the desired proportions, and in fact equity programs originally prioritized outreach to achieve that, but as it turns out, few industries have a demographic profile that matches the overall population. Therefore some have turned to racist and sexist exclusion.
Prioritizing non-whites and non-Asians for things like university admissions, employment and promotions is the same thing. You're not just giving your preferred groups the opportunity to compete, you're lowering your standards for them and raising them for the disfavored groups, creating barriers based on an immutable characteristic, which is skin color. Plain and simple racism.
You don't have to post your alleged experience with racism if you don't want to, but to then imply that I am racist for sharing mine and asking you to reciprocate sure is disingenuous. For the record, I care about equality, which is why I reject equity, since its implementation is predicated on the discriminatory policies that I described.
> When someone mentions a 'lack of Black representation', they're not saying that non-Black members are less valuable because of their skin color. Rather, they're highlighting that there appears to be a systemic issue preventing people of that particular race from participating or advancing in that space.
"Appears to be systemic racism" might be half a step too far. I would say, "The possibility exists. We should look carefully and see if there is, and if so, what we can do to fix it." But we should not assume systemic racism every time there are racially unequal outcomes.
Asians get into top colleges out of proportion to their numbers. Should we say there "appears to be a systemic issue" in favor of Asians? Or should we, perhaps, not take disparate outcomes as prima facie evidence of systemic racism?
I'm not saying that we should sweep it under the rug: "Nothing to see here." By all means, when there are disparate outcomes, look carefully. It's just that the wording went a bit too far, in the absence of further evidence.
What makes you think speaker slots aren't equitably distributed? If there are 4 black Rust devs among every 100 Rust devs and there are 10 speaker slots, odds are there are no black speakers but that would still be an equitable distribution.
> How can intelligent people not see this kind of thinking leads to the worst of social divisions?
Intelligent people do see it. It’s typically people that have no actual direct value to contribute but still want to score points that focus on all kinds of secondary topics.
I, for one, would love to see compile-time reflection in Rust and I'm genuinely curious how somebody exploring the feasibility of that feature could make anybody feel uncomfortable.
As a minority, I've been subject to firm decisions made on the basis of extremely dubious reasoning before. Is it bias? Who knows, it's never clear-cut in any specific example. But when it just seems to keep happening and nobody can explain why, it certainly feels fishy.
And of course, being on hiring panels and hearing comments like "I don't like how she talks" or "I don't trust men who wear scarves" or "I don't think he'll fit the culture (which is mostly white)" made about candidates, and "I don't see any problem with hiring based on attractiveness" as a "joke" after a hiring decision was made in favor of a conventionally attractive woman... and later hearing comments like "I've never discriminated against anybody" come out of the same mouths? I don't buy it. I don't think I'm unbiased. I don't know how anybody could possibly think that about themselves.
I’m a minority, and arguably now considered an industry expert as well in my domain (graphics). The vast majority of time I’m the only minority involved in several circles.
I am trying to raise diversity in these groups, across age, ethnicity and gender.
But it’s so difficult to do when few others also join in that effort. Not because they’re necessarily bigoted (though some are), but they don’t see it.
The only effective means I’ve found is to actually highlight the disparity between diversity in the industry versus representation in the committees. Then suddenly people have an amazing colleague that they forgot to invite, or a rising star Junior dev who could be mentored into the role.
Sometimes people just need to be reminded that the status quo isn’t above questioning and that they have their own implicit biases that they just never reflect on.
> Let me flip your quote back on you: how can intelligent people still believe in unbiased meritocracy being the default?
Very few people I think would argue that systems based on meritocracy have zero bias. This is not the point. The point is that today’s conventional wisdom by the progressive left is that these biases must be resolved by a system of affirmative action where every sub culture or group somehow is proportionally representative of the overall population based on race, gender, etc. For some reason, that outcome is thought to be the best way to affirm that no bias exists in a group. Personally I think that premise is just very flawed.
Meritocracy is not a perfect system. No one is saying that. But it’s the best system we have for engaging with the actual content that is relevant to any given group. As far as bias is concerned, the best we can do is call out specific instances of it and try to squash and correct those (and maybe this case in this blog post is one). There is no commonly understood way to measure bias or racism that everyone agrees with and so why would we think that measuring representation would somehow be the best solution?
I agree with you though about the cries about reverse racism. Not helpful to the discussion.
But I also believe that when someone cries out bias or discrimination by some group because of underrepresentation or lack of diversity, they are implying that affirmative action is the way to solve it. Maybe I'm putting words into people's mouths there, but it's just anecdotal
“They are implying” is putting words in their mouths like you say.
There’s a whole field of nuance in between “do nothing” and “affirmative action”. People deserve the benefit of not having someone else’s argument ascribed to them.
I don't think it's racist, but I do think it's tunnel vision and not taking into context in the greater context of society. There is obviously and undeniably a paucity of black people in STEM. So yeah, I think that having someone get a +1 for being a POC in a group of several +1's in choosing something like a keynote speaker. It's a chicken-and-egg problem in STEM. It should never be the sole determination, but if you're down to keynote speaker of basically identically talented keynotes, then being a non-white person can be that +1 to make a decision. Fairness does not always equate to exactly the same treatment
So now there are two stories from the one of the sides, is there any stories from the other sides? Namely, from the people who felt so "uncomfortable" about a technical topic that they had to uninvite a keynote speaker?
As things stand, this whole things smells very weird, so weird I almost cannot believe what happened, so would be most interesting to hear what the other side has to say.
Reading between the lines, they were uncomfortable about the implication that keynote speech = product direction, for a talk that they didn't want to be perceived as a product direction. Seems like something that can be fixed with a disclaimer slide or maybe better decision making up front.
His blog is call The pasture and has a bunch of sheep looking characters, could it be that people got uncomfortable about his furry implications maybe?
As a non-american I must say I don't understand where the latter half of the article comes from. Why care about race? Why must a racist reason be sought behind everything?
This stood out to me as well. Granted, the person people felt "uncomfortable" about only later tweeted out that the 0% black representation was an outlier, but I haven't heard much reason why this is relevant yet.
On the other hand, there's more going on than what's being told publicly. Perhaps racism does play a role in this. The use of the word "uncomfortable" without clear explanation suggests this is more than just "we don't want another reflection flame war".
It's possible that this person was just hoping to use the keynote speaker as a token of inclusiveness, but I have to wonder if there isn't more going on if racism is brought up after incredible vague notions of people feeling "uncomfortable" being given as a reason why they keynote speaker got demoted to a normal speaker either.
I'm hoping the remaining leadership owns up to their mistake, put out a detailed reason why the purely technical topic of reflection is making them so uncomfortable, and lay out proper measures to prevent this from happening again, with the necessary correctional measures applied to the leadership member who went behind the others' backs on changing the invitation. They'd also need to come up with a clear and honest apology, of course.
If they can't give a decent objective reason why they're so "uncomfortable", or don't get real professional real fast, there's much more drama to be had the coming weeks.
I think it's just SJW mudslinging. Imply someone's a racist and they spend so much time defending themselves against the accusation that people just start to assume they're racist. Activist cultures have the nastiest in-fighting.
Life is unfair and some people will use anything they can, whether it be race or whatever, to get ahead. I did the same thing when I was younger: I wrote a book at age 15 and marketed it as being written by a teenager to get sales. In this case, I played into my age rather than race, but the idea is the same.
I mean, sometimes it’s not one’s race—sometimes it’s sexuality, gender, religion, disability, or some other variable that I missed. And people in America think along those variables because they have a history of disenfranchising and discriminating people along those axes.
Unironically, Americans think like this because they're more progressive than Europeans (some, anyway; some are way less). Europe has a history of disenfranchisement too, and to the extent they don't see it much it's because they have more homogeneous societies (until recently, with refugees). The melting pot of the new world was always life on higher difficulty: you don't get to be racist while pretending you're not because you're never tested on it as a society. You don't get to outlaw slavery, posturing like you're doing it because you're just that virtuous when in reality it's because it's easy to do when your economy doesn't rely on slavery so it's an easy way to look good. In this crucible, minds are traumatized into reverse-racism and performative bullshit.
Well, the Associated Press style guide squarely disagrees with you.
Not having a label for something makes it really difficult to talk about issues around that subject. How am I supposed to advocate for a group of people who have it rough, specifically for their skin color, if I can't use the term for their skin color?
> even USian anthropologists (roughly) agree with me
But also note that the position of the AAA is not that racial inequality does not exist at all (and therefore should not be spoken of, as seems to be your position); their position is that it exists on social, rather than biological, grounds:
> we conclude that present-day inequalities between so-called "racial" groups are not consequences of their biological inheritance but products of historical and contemporary social, economic, educational, and political circumstances
I agree with you, though I don’t know if it’s really exporting to be writing about it on a personal blog or even an American news site like this one. Note the anthropologist take was adopted in 1998; things have changed a lot domestically since then.
Have you ever been the victim of losing a position because you weren't white? Have you even been turned down for a loan because you weren't white or straight or were “different”. That's why it's a big deal. It isn't everything, but it is a factor all over in America. I seriously don't believe anyone who says it isn't also an issue in other places as well. I lived in Europe for a year in various parts and heard racist talk just as surely as I have as an American, so don't tell me that it's not an issue in other countries, I know it is. Racism is just a subset of ethnic discrimination. It was a little more subtle in most cases, but it was there.
I once got a talk demoted from a normal talk to a lightning talk at some unrelated conference to make it work with the schedule.
That was indeed not nice. But also not "Cruelty". I just acted professionaly and accepted the change.
Melodrama from the blog post aside, publicly downgrading a talk for an industry wide conference is very much a slap to a speaker's face.
"Hey we think you have great ideas to share, and would really like you to share them."
On short notice: "One of our team members thinks your ideas aren't that important after all, we are going to remove you from the headline. Please keep it short kthxbye."
It shows bad planning, bad organization, lack of cohesion, and outright disrespect of your professional time. You may choose to accept that slap to your face (signaling that it's okay to do that to you), but there's nothing unprofessional about rejecting the attendance and rightfully criticizing the organizers for their rudeness.
Make a joke about it in the presentation. This talk was downgraded to get less visibility. So I’ve renamed the talk to “What Rust leadership doesn’t want you to know”.
I agree that it’s bad planning. And in particular, the reasons of “discomfort” are really terrible. However, it’s a very small hill to die on. Like, a mound.
I think it would have also been perfectly professional to decline in that case, since it's clearly poor planning on the part of the folks organizing the talk. And demoting the keynote speaker is even worse - especially when in this instance something like scheduling doesn't seem to be the excuse
Was it a talk that you submitted on your own choice, or were you asked to give the original talk? In this case, the speaker was asked to keynote-speak, when they had not planned on doing so.
If there are malicious actors, by "acting professionally" (probably meaning to ignore your emotions) you are allowing those who are malicious, and do not act professionally, to continue doing that.
Others acting professionally is the best outcome for those who do not do so.
This bit stood out to me as the main thing that's probably at least rationally explainable:
> Why did RustConf leadership go along with this decision and not protect the speaker? Why wasn't Rust leadership notified of the time period in which to change the decision?
which feeds from:
> A person in Rust leadership then, without taking a vote from the interim leadership group (remember, JeanHeyd was voted on and selected by Rust leadership), reached directly to RustConf leadership and asked to change the invitation.
I can easily picture the RustConf leadership believing that the person from Rust leadership was either operating with full knowledge of the leadership, or would be communicating with them.
I've lost track of the amount of things where the thing itself is cool but the fan club is insufferable.
I've grown to really like Rust over the years, but this was very much despite the Rust fanatics, not because of them.
Now that ChatGPT has come along, I find it much preferable for coding assistance than dealing with the Rust fandom. "Why are you bothering with all this FFI stuff? You should just rewrite all your dependencies in Rust!" shudder
The rust community is great, but definitely avoid the power structures. Thats the same for any niche programming language by the way. That said rust does seem to have a lot of public drama, the whole team or something quit last year, I don't remember. Just remember OSS is a game of trying to get people to do a lot of work for zero compensation beyond social recognition or the fun of doing things... There's going to be a lot of slimy stuff around the organizations behind that.
This behavior is the Rust leadership team is completely juvenile.
Y'all need to grow up.
Disagreement in technical development is highly valuable... alternative points of view should be prized and inspected, not ostracized. Quashing alternate views and opinions is a sign of a small intellect and/or a narcissistic personality disorder.
For the good of the Rust community, there needs to be some transparency on who exactly did what and those people who deviated from Rust leadership rules need to apologize. It w
Someone is an expert in this field.
They're asked to speak at RustConf after a leadership vote.
They've also written an article about reflection in Rust - a purely technical thing that is already pretty widely disliked conceptually. (EDIT: the talk was about this, but it's also compile time reflection and came with the usual disclaimer that it was not representative of any of the Rust team's viewpoints or support)
Rust members were "uncomfortable" with this purely technical viewpoint - not their behavior, personal beliefs, or even their demographic?
And then they pushed them out of the conference behind leadership's back?
Did I miss something? This is indeed really childish behavior.
EDIT: oh. It's not even reflection, it's compile time reflection. As in, it's not the next Java but instead something that might actually be very useful for the language if done correctly.
https://thephd.dev/i-am-no-longer-speaking-at-rustconf-2023
> The sudden reversal smacks of shadowy decisions that are non-transparent to normal contributors like myself. It is a brutal introduction to the way the Rust Project actually does business that is not covered by its publicly-available Procedures and Practices and absolutely not at all mentioned in its Code of Conduct.
Agreed. The Rust project needs to stamp this out before it begins to fester. This is incredibly stupid behavior coming from what is being regarded as the next C++.
Come on, Rust committee. Let's grow up here, shall we?