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.
There basically is no other usable compiler than the official rust compiler. So it has this 'leadership' thing that ... C never really needed
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.
EDIT: elaborated a bit more.
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.
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.
Hmm, not sure about that one. Rust has an enormous hype component to it, more than any other language I'm aware of.
It may have strong technical leadership, but saying it's gaining market share "precisely" because of it is precisely misleading.
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)
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessne...
Which is even worse than an explicit hierarchy, because it provides more gray area for people with power to do things anonymously.
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.
https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/vxgzrl/changes_in_the...
Mod response:
> For all those wondering about removed comments, there was some trolling going on which was summarily removed by the mods.
> Please avoid any trolling and/or drama seeking comments and remember our subreddit rules.
"Trolling" on display in the archives of that thread: https://www.reveddit.com/v/rust/comments/vxgzrl/changes_in_t...
And then there's Graydon's reply to the "we will exclude you," in the code of conduct, and the subsequent drama: https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/6ewjt5/question_about...
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.
We should not whitewash the past because the present isn't what we want.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
Too big to fail can easily also mean too big to fix.
Failure is often not the worst outcome -- at least failure creates space for a fixed alternative to arise in the space left open.
Really? Nothing against a thing that leads to hypersensitive intolerant mob behavior and authoritarian/anti democratic tendencies!?
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”.
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.
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'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.
There's a reason people don't want to talk about racism, and it's not because it doesn't exist anymore...
