The Rust Foundation is a 501(c)(6) and not a 501(c)(3). The Rust Foundation would do better for the community if they were a 501(c)(3) and more transparent about finances.
There is no need for a new fund, the existing funds should be directed towards development and there should be greater transparency about how funds are gathered and spent.
This post is devoid of details and action. It should read that the Rust Foundation is going to convert to a 501(c)(3) and ensure that current funds are spent on development. Otherwise, this is a shell game with the existing funds and how they are going to be spent. Understand that sleight of hand bodes poorly and suggest impropriety.
Rust came first, so people who didn't like Rust flocked to Zig as an alternative, and were keen to promote it as an alternative to Rust by criticising Rust, as wider usage would provide them more of an ecosystem to use in their own Zig programs.
People who were happy with Rust didn't have same need to criticise Zig in online spaces as Rust is the established player in the C alternatives space. (Though Rust is on the other side when compared to C once you expand the space to "all low level programming languages").
Also for people who don't care about the space at all, Rust has had years of exposure to promote fatigue, while Zig hasn't (yet).
Zig's BDFL was an early major supporter of Rust. It was Rust's core maintainer group who excluded him and warred against his language. The leaders decided any "memory unsafe" language was against "consensus"; first C, then Zig. They even posted on Twitter, calling Zig a "step backwards". This Language Supremacism was even worse in conferences and in private.
Today, you can see a lot of the core ex-leaders still sniping at at other language and even successful OSS projects based in those languages. The Zig community has its faults but Rust takes the cake for relentless gamesmanship.
The beef you're talking about here is between pcwalton and Andrew. Patrick posted those things after he had left Rust leadership.
Andrew and I literally got some tacos last week. I mean, I'm not in Rust leadership anymore either, but this sort of thing just isn't recognizable to me outside of, again, a few posts by one person who no longer even worked on Rust.
Yes, he was free to express his bigotry once he stepped down. Before that, Patrick was the leader and he hated non-memory-safe languages. He was not the only one, and that hate got worse after he left.
It's nice you got tacos with Zig's BDFL and I don't categorize you as a "hater". Rather, I think the Rust Core Group altogether was toxic. Unable to see their hate as hate, and having memories largely selective and largely untrustworthy.
> people who didn't like Rust flocked to Zig as an alternative, and were keen to promote it as an alternative to Rust by criticising Rust, as wider usage would provide them more of an ecosystem to use in their own Zig programs.
> People who were happy with Rust didn't have same need to criticise Zig in online spaces as Rust is the established player in the C alternatives space. (Though Rust is on the other side when compared to C once you expand the space to "all low level programming languages").
I think that this effect is...more real and intentional than I wish it was or think is healthy.
There's no denying that Rust benefited greatly from heavy "language evangelism" from around 2014-2022 or so (rough subjective range of dates, ending with when I feel like Rust became sufficiently mainstream that "comment section evangalism" is no longer the primary driver of the language's growth). The atmosphere that surrounded the language evangalism during this era -- from my recollection as someone who was aware of Rust but explicitly not interested in it at the time -- felt like one of curiousity and exploring new innovation in the programming language design space, and it didn't come across as pushy or some kind of moral imperative.
Additionally, most of the evangelism was not driven by the Rust project itself, but more of a grassroots thing from:
- Early users
- People who thought the language was interesting without having used it
- The attention that came from prolific early Rust projects like Servo and ripgrep
- The attention that came from the language's technical innovations
(The only person I remember regularly seeing in Rust threads who was actually associated with the project was Steve Klabnik, and I consider him a stellar example of how to represent a project online in a way that's respectful and not pushy or combative.) And eventually I had a programming task where, thanks to those deep, insightful, and respectful comment threads, I recognized that Rust was the right tool for the task I was trying to accomplish, learned the language myself, found it a joy to use, and began using it more regularly.
But once Rust became mainstream, the eternal September kicked in. Now there seem to be quite a lot of people who are more interested in "language wars" than in healthy, technical discussion of programming languages, and it's exhausting. Many threads about C or C++ or Rust or Zig or Fil-C or whatever seems to get overtaken by these obnoxious, repetitive, preachy, ideological comments about why you should or shouldn't be using Rust, often with very ill-informed armchair takes.
I think this is just something that comes from mainstream Internet culture and is not very representative of "the Rust community", and especially not the Rust project -- most of the serious writing and comments coming from people actually involved with Rust have that spirit of respect, openness, and curiousity about programming language design that I remember from the 2010's. A lot of people who work on Rust are deeply interested in the tradeoffs and innovations of new programming languages and fundamentally excited about the possibility of Rust becoming obsolete because something better has come along. But now that Rust adoption is increasing and the broader Internet culture is being forced to consider it, you see a lot of unhealthy reactionary takes from people who act like programming languages are a zero-sum game and they need to pick a side.
Now Zig is where this gets a little bit odd to me. My impression (as an outsider to the Zig community as well) is that Zig's leadership has chosen to view adoption as a zero-sum language war. It's as if they considered:
- How Rust benefited from language evangelism during the 2010's
- How many other "C-replacement" languages over the past 25 years have failed to gain large-scale adoption
- How "language war" discourse is extremely effective for enagement on places like HN
...and decided that the best way to increase Zig adoption is by intentionally leaning into that high-engagement "language war" discourse. Maybe it's not intentional -- and there's certainly a lot of cool ideas and high-quality technical discussion that comes out of the Zig community -- but I've also seen a consistent pattern of snarky or hostile comments from Zig leadership towards Rust people (such as calling Rust users "safety coomers", or jumping into in-depth technical discussions of Rust's downsides like compiler performance with substance-less cheap shots). Whereas I can't remember ever seeing anything but respect and curiosity from people involved in the Rust project towards other communities.
I'm just tired of seeing people draw battle lines around programming languages instead of promoting a spirit of learning from each other and making our tools better.
That's one hell of a post. I'm reading that Rust deserved to be evaluated on its technical merits (which I'm happy with), but Zig has some community issues in closer examination?
I've looked at the major rust implements from big corp. It's all Arc, copy/clone, and people getting fired.
I think that both languages deserve to be evaluated on their technical merits, of which there are many. I would say they are both very well-designed languages that occupy different points in the design space and each have unique innovations of their own, and are worthy of the attention they get. I also think both languages have strong communities and good technical leadership.
What I'm frustrated about is a general pattern in online discourse of treating programming language adoption as a zero-sum game and pitting the communities against each other. This is nothing remotely new -- holy wars over tooling are just about as old as computing itself -- but Rust seems to have become right at the center of it in the last few years, and I think this is likely just a result of it becoming "mainstream" enough for people to care about it outside of a niche circle. I consider that a community issue with Rust, but probably an unavoidable one given the scale of the Internet.
The thing that feels different to me about Zig is that the language's leadership participates in the "holy war", which is different than what I have observed from Rust's leadership. It's one thing if random netizens are trash talking the "opposing team" like a sports fan, but I would expect people who are deeply involved in programming language design and representing their community to know better and behave better than that. It's surprising and disappointing to me; it drags down the overall quality of discourse and sets a bad example for the language communities.
Maybe my own perspective on this is skewed, perhaps I'm looking at Rust's past with rose-tinted glasses. But I think my experiences are comparable. From 2015-2020 I was primarily working with Swift and closely following that language's design and development, and the Rust community (which I was not involved in at all) felt like friendly neighbors. The two communities shared similar goals and had a lot of like-minded people, and because of that there was a lot of overlap and amicability between the communities. Both languages' teams were frequently comparing notes and copying features from one another.
Now I'm primarily working with Rust and closely following that languages' design and development, and it seems to me like the Zig community (which I am not involved with at all) should be on the same friendly terms for the same reasons, but the vibes I see from them are "this town isn't big enough for the two of us", and I'm bothered by that.
> I've looked at the major rust implements from big corp. It's all Arc, copy/clone, and people getting fired.
I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. Are you saying you've seen projects implemented in Rust go poorly? If so, I don't know what to say without any context, besides that I don't think there's a "one size fits all" for programming languages.
Or are you saying big companies' contributions towards the Rust project itself have gone poorly? I don't really know what to say about that either. I have felt that the direction the project has taken over the past few years has represented me and addressed my needs well, so I have confidence in their technical direction and leadership for the time being.
Agree with your take on Zig, as it's clear their leadership promotes a foul filled war on other C alternative languages. Not just Rust, but others like Vlang, Dlang, C3, etc... HN has become dominated by them, where other languages (outside of Rust and Zig), can get very little shine. When they do, their light often gets snuffed out quickly.
The perception of Zig and Rust within different communities can vary, and Zig may not attract the same level of "lukewarm response" as Rust due to several factors, including their design philosophies, target use cases, and community engagement.
Zig's appeal lies in its deliberate simplicity and explicitness, offering a different path to high-performance, low-level programming compared to Rust's safety-first, more complex approach. This divergence in philosophy and implementation leads to different reception within the programming community.
This will be anecdotal. However both in the academia and in the semi-professional space, I encountered certain type of programmer who is a bit more "religiously minded" (both in the technical space and quite often in their personal beliefs too). Unix, although being a quite commercial project, its academic origins attracted a kind of followers, who believe there is a certain purity we can reach with computers or software that's not bound to the practical and economic use-cases. This forms an identity and they tend to regard programmers who are in this ecosystem as gods or prophets. The origins of Unix is also mixed with the free software movement due to both academic origins and regarded as a one continuous movement.
C language is strongly tied to Unix ecosystem. C language and current compilers give this illusion of "ultimate control" to the programmers (although C has been interpreted quite freely for the sake of optimizations). With GNU C compiler finding a niche (i.e. being a free as in beer C compiler and a userland that's not bounded by the original Unix or BSD licensing / patents) and taking off in many servers the beliefs were kind of validated.
Rust attacks those beliefs in multiple fronts:
First and foremost, Rust comes from an inherent distrust to the programmer's abilities to write secure software. Rust creates strong obstacles against writing "magic" programs that freely interpret memory. Programmers are not treated as gods but fallible mortals who needed to be guided. Many C programmers interpret this as an insult to their abilities to manually check and verify a program. Rust is no less capable than C, it has all sorts of escape hatches that can be used in performance critical parts.
Rust compiler itself and the most of the programs written in Rust are permissively licensed. This is to avoid possible issues with copyleft licenses combined with statically linked binaries. Without having a stable ABI or ability to incorporate third party libraries post-build, GPL and LGPL create hurdles that doesn't exist in the mostly dynamically compiled world of C.
Rust has a more equal regard of the operating systems, including non-POSIX ones like Windows. Despite most people in the world interact with non-POSIX APIs the most, accepting it as another step.
Rust community tries its best to create a safe space for marginalized parts of the society. Go to any Rust conference and you'll see an over-representation of LGBTQ people. This probably rubs majorly white male subset of strongly identifying C programmers up wrong way.
The community also welcomes a bunch of different ways of thinking and questioning the basics of every single decision we made when we were building the systems of today.
Zig, on the other hand doesn't attack any of those "base principles". It fixes the most annoying parts of C programming: fluid integer types, really weak type system, hostile dependency management. It still trusts the programmer 100%. The default behavior is still unsafe.
People who choose Rust are also particularly worried about the security of the programs and they would like to prove and validate the language's existence and goals. They do that by reimplementing very popular and very senior projects in Rust and compare its performance and safety against existing C projects too. Many such projects have enjoyed a long time of no competition and now there is one.
Your comment is really quite interesting. Thanks! What you're saying all sounds plausible to me.
I note that, while different circles may call for "purity" (fans of, e.g., Unix, Lisp, or Haskell), I think honestly pursuing the purity of writing programs to achieve one's goals means rejecting dogmatism and accepting pragmatism. Adherence to beliefs is fine if, and only if, the beliefs are fundamentally justified....
It isn't all of the objection, but there is a non-neglible amount of anti-woke people who find some weak technical reason to hate rust. It's silly but you'll be amazed in how often you see it line up when checking a random sampling of people who show up in rust threads just to make off topic complaints about rust.
EDIT: I hadn't fully gone through the comment section on this one yet and yikes it's worse about it than normal.
Non-negligible from what perspective? Is this group of people somehow holding back unbridled adoption and enthusiasm for Rust? Is it possible for tech people to drum up excitement for a newer language without it being political just because you insist that it is?
I think I see most Rust threads here. Perhaps there is a low presence in most threads, but I didn't notice a significant rate as the baseline. Though this thread is burning up, certainly.
Where were these things promised to you? I was there then too, and maybe one or two of these things were relevant if you squint, but also many of them were actively not promised.
> * With a great non-political community (actually, this is the biggest lie of all).
I recall the opposite, that the rust language (before the foundation) position was that being apolitical was a political stance. This is not the exact message I remember https://x.com/rustlang/status/1267519582505512960 and also can't realistically cover the entire community at large, as if that even has a single political stance.
The group that insists on keeping a community or software project 'non-political' often fails to recognize that this stance is itself a political position. They claim to want a neutral space, but what they really mean is that the existing political view does not align with their own. By dismissing other perspectives as 'political' while treating their own as neutral, they end up being both hypocritical and unwilling (or unable) to acknowledge that their opinions are political too.
I agree that those were not actually "promises" but "directions", and I apologise for that. Those directions were mainly cited in different conferences by some Rust-head-members at that time (Alex Crichton, Niko Matsakis, Ashley Williams, or even you), and during conversations I had with severals during Rust Fest or RustCon.
For example, I remember talking that with you at the Rust Fest 2017, in Zurich actually, especially about the *very early version* of Async/Await.
It is ok for the community to move on different directions than the first one, and I don't blame any of you for that.
Niko and Alex were the only ones in leadership in 2013, I didn't until 2014, and Ashley later. Rust Fest and Rust Con didn't come along until much later.
> It is ok for the community to move on different directions than the first one
I agree, I just disagree with your characterization of "the first one." There were differences between the original Rust and what shipped, but almost none of it has to do with what you've said. In 2012-2013, Rust very explicitly changed a lot across time, and now it certainly does not. Async/await drove a lot of that adoption. Rust was always "political", even before 2012.
Amazon fired every Rust project team member except Niko and weihanglo over the last year. Which is a major contributor to why the foundation started looking into funding maintainers
Non-political almost always means "accept the social status quo I am used to".
I think there is a reasonable argument that the default for a community with technical goals should be to accept social status quo conventions unless they conflict with the communities technical goals. But if the social default is "girls don't code and queers should hide" there is a reasonable counterargument that these conflict with the goal of making the technology (and community) available to everyone.
> But if the social default is "girls don't code and queers should hide"
Queers should hide definitely isn't any social default unless the code is exclusively developed in Gaza. "Do what you like but please stick to technical considerations" isn't "you need to hide".
You seem to have read that as literally "hide if you are queer". What I meant to encompass was also "hide that you're queer". And that's absolutely a norm that exists, and that can perfectly well hide behind "stick to technical considerations". If you say "I prefer to be referred to by these pronouns" then the reply "please stick to technical considerations" is not neutral. If someone would point out @acronym_XYZ is actually a woman when someone referred to her as he, nobody would reply with "please stick to technical considerations". "Please stick to technical considerations" as a response to any behavior that is outside some societal default is not enforcing a technical concern, it's enforcing the societal default, including when there are no technical reasons to do so.
That doesn't mean that "Please stick to technical considerations" or quite simply "that's off-topic" are never valid. They very much are. It simply means that they don't provide some clean clear demarcation line around which to organize a technical community.
> If you say "I prefer to be referred to by these pronouns" then the reply "please stick to technical considerations" is not neutral.
There's no single societal norm in worldwide source projects; that's just you monolithing a diverse set of groups. In this particular instance if you're just a GitHub handle then whether you're female or you wish to be called "her" then that doesn't require hiding that you're "queer", but it also doesn't require mentioning it. Just say, "actually it's 'she'" and you're done.
I thought you merely misread my comment. But it really seems you are very determined to pretend that there are no reasons for people to hide that they are queer, which, given the current political climate, is just bizarre to me.
I assumed you were talking about laws because the social default in places like the south of the US is definitely that visibly queer people should hide.
I'm an LGBT person with a trans partner and I find many codes of conduct to be chastising and purposefully finger pointing to conservative people.
A lot of them are basically, "your religious teachings or cultural upbringing aren't welcome here"
I don't agree with religious texts, but that's what you're wagging in their face with some of the CoCs.
Leave it at "don't be an asshole". It's that simple.
The current political climate, I feel, is a direct reaction to this.
A politically neutral space wouldn't permit religious people to harass trans or LGBT people, but it also wouldn't give anyone latitude to throw stones the other way either.
CoCs are "you're not welcome here at all".
Another thing: you always see language and project logos modified to bear the rainbow, trans, and BLM colors. You never see anything supporting Asians, white people, men, or Christians. If you did this, you would be called out as a racist. Which is so ironic.
Let's just get along and work together. Maybe we'll find more agreements amongst ourselves that way instead of trying to divide everyone into camps.
Some progressives are going to get very pissed off at this comment, but I grew up and live in the South. You can (and often must) work with people you don't agree with. It's not impossible to be friends either. You might wind up changing their mind, and they might wind up making you more tolerant as well.
I agree with you, although of course "don't be an asshole" is only simple to enforce in practice. In the current climate, I expect that people considered "conservative" will still be highly hostile to good faith (let alone not) enforcements.
No matter the person, it's really disappointing that we're still entrenched in the mentalities of tribalism, anti-intellectualism, "if you're not with us, you're against us", "an eye for an eye", "someone hurt me, so I'm going to hurt someone", and so on. And by "person", that includes me.
The Earth politics patch really can't come soon enough. How much do we pay the devs, again?
Just want to say I appreciate you publicly taking this stance (on what appears to be a non-throwaway account, no less). As a fellow LGBT person I feel so alienated from other progressive-leaning people and communities because of my belief in how those who don't share my beliefs should be treated.
When saying these things out loud can be social suicide, well, it means a lot to see someone else say it first. So thanks. I hope tolerance can come back into fashion.
This is all fun and games until a “politically neutral” decision is made by a programming language foundation to refer to all trans people using they/them. How would that make you feel?
The most politically neutral decision in this case would be to let people refer to others with whichever pronouns accord to the speaker's beliefs, without reprimand.
Morality partially stems from autonomy (in the sense that "I should be able to act as I please"). According to autonomy, a person should be able to act freely, and two people should be able to interact similarly. One person's policy will be judged by any other, who is free to act by a distinct policy. But autonomy alone doesn't make for a good person, or a good society. The other factor in morality is non-hypocrisy (in the sense that "I should act how I say I should act").
I've laid out a neutral response. Of course I have my personal beliefs, as one does, but I speak here without pretense. Believe what you will.
Yeah that's the fastest way to breed animosity in these communities. Insisting on calling someone by a name they don't use for themselves is extremely antagonistic.
r/programminglanguages has the right idea: put a pride flag in the logo and a lot of these problems just sort themselves out.
the flag logo has proven surprisingly effective at weeding out bigots. Not just in this thread or the previous one, but also in the moderator mail: we've had at least several instances of mouth breathers writing rants along the lines of "How dare you use colors in your logo!" (that's a very nice "translation" of what's actually written in those cases). Similarly, several comments in this thread have been removed and their authors banned, due to comments that boil down to "I'm not a bigot, I just hate LGBTQ+ people". This will not change, based on the simple premise that such people aren't worth having around in any community, and these people don't contribute anything of value anyway.
And it does work out well, the discussions stay on topic, LGBTQ issues aren't really a community topic despite the flag. Here's how that works out in practice, from today:
Someone says "he", they're corrected with "she", and that's the end of it. In more toxic communities where people are encouraged to use whatever pronouns they want, that simple interaction because a whole thing, where eventually one person calls the other delusional, the other calls them a bigot, and then no one is talking about programming languages. It's an eternal struggle, and for many people who build and maintain programming languages, they prefer to kick out the bigot rather than be called delusional, so everyone can get back to talking about programming languages. Still, there are plenty of online spaces, especially language spaces, where LGBTQ people are made to feel excluded. People upset with the flag or pronouns can join one of those communities, and everyone is happy.
(If anyone is wondering what kind of comments, they're usually veiled or not so veiled threats along the lines of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45727677. If the mere presence of the flag keeps people like this out, that's fine by me.)
> Here's how that works out in practice, from today:
> Someone says "he", they're corrected with "she", and that's the end of it.
This is a good example of conversational flow in an environment where people are not reprimanded for referring to others with pronouns that accord to the speaker's personal worldview. One person says "he", another person says "she", and everyone tolerates this difference of expression whether they agree with it or not.
Essentially it's the most politically neutral stance on pronouns, as implemented in an everyday conversation.
So you can see why they put it in scare quotes. Just above your reply another says it's politically neutral to adopt whatever pronouns the speaker feels is valid, and not punish them for it. This is "neutral" in that it sides with the speaker regardless of who they are, but is clearly designed to allow bigots to misgender freely. That is the point, "neutral" is not so trivially defined, and often falls on the side of more conservative societal trends.
What would you consider to be truly politically neutral, then? Because it seems we're in agreement that a decision to "refer to all trans people using they/them" would not fit the bill. But whether it's politically neutral or not, it's unnecessarily exclusionary; that's what I take issue with.
(for the record I do realize the phrase 'politically neutral' is vague and unclear, and often used as a conservative dogwhistle, which is why I generally avoid it)
An example of the sort of Code of Conduct I personally feel is the most inclusive and 'politically neutral' in a non-scare-quotes-dogwhistle way is the Hacker News guidelines[0]. I think the moderation in general here does a good job of promoting open discussion across people from a wide variety of backgrounds.
> that's what you're wagging in their face with some of the CoCs.
I never mentioned codes of conduct in my comment.
Those are orthogonal to the observation that communities are fundamentally political.
> Leave it at "don't be an asshole". It's that simple.
Sure, and "don't be an asshole" is a political statement. The subjects and objects of that sentence are people and the intent is to affect how they interact.
If you feel that that's the kind of thing that community members should write down and say to each other, then you're implicitly agreeing with my claim that politics is what communities do.
I suspect you think you and I would disagree with what politics a community should espouse, but that's not my point at all. All I'm saying is that every community, every group of people coordinating together, is a political beast. It's true of an anarcho-syndalistic art collective from Portland who only communicate through crypto-signed commits on their self-hosted fork of Fossil, it's true of a gang of skinhead bikers meeting regularly at a dive bar, and it's true of the Rust community.
When people regularly interact with each other and communicate about how they should interact... they are politicking. "Politics" has become a bad word for some people, but it's the less bad word we have available to describe what it is people are doing when they are establishing the norms and practices of their regular repeated interactions.
> You can (and often must) work with people you don't agree with.
Life's for too short to force people to do this, and ideally we should make it as feasible as possible for as many people as possible to never have to do this.
Not quite your fault, but the framing of "people you don't agree with" juxtaposed with the implicit statement of "people who promote hate" (or similar) doesn't make for a clear discussion. To be clear, those two types are well separated. If someone is of the latter type, really truly they are, then they can be removed without further ado (and I think GP would agree). I think the situations that are less clear cut will make people in good faith fight.
This is a crazy notion. If I have to like everybody to work with them, we can't have a civilization because I don't like most people.
I like some people. Everybody else I work with if they're willing to work with me. Saying that we all have to agree with each other is basically giving up on the political project entirely, and going back to strongman rulers who organize by demanding conformity. Very relevant in these times.
> we should make it as feasible as possible for as many people as possible to never have to do this.
No, we should make it impossible to avoid so people can't sneak into adulthood without being properly socialized.
I think that many people leaning toward the latter are "merely" misguided, though I certainly don't think that to correct them would be easy. However, I genuinely think some people are taken to be hateful when they aren't. Discussion of such cases should not be taken with the presumption that the accusations of hate are true, because then truth gives way to opinion. A good cause is a good cause, but realization invites bias.
College athlete Lia Smith died by suicide last week after years of targeted harassment and attacks from the people we're talking about. At some point, when the institutions of power do everything they can to demonize your existence, strip you of your accomplishments, and vilify you publicly—across millions of people nationwide—it doesn't matter whether you call it murder or not. The deaths rack up all the same.
Imagine the flip side. We could easily wind up in that world too.
The best defense against polarization is a strong and cohesive middle ground.
If you pull to far in the other way, all the bonds break. And it's a race for each interest group to seize power, rather than having some intermediating force that serves as a buffer.
Again: look at the political climate. It's a reaction. The pendulum is swinging harder and harder because we've given up on the middle ground.
Most of the people you hate (and you do seem to dislike them at least a little bit) have honestly never had an LGBT friend. Imagine if they did how that might change them.
Instead they hear voices from the LGBT community that want to outlaw them and their way of life. That's pretty hostile. And definitely is going to be met with the same attitude you're giving them.
I'm LGBT and I have many conservative friends. They're more apt to come around to it than you believe. You're shutting down any conversation before it can even happen.
> Instead they hear voices from the LGBT community
Oftentimes, the voices are outside.
I think you're somewhat optimistic, and "the middle ground" is not a magical place. It's easy to fall into a false sense of security that comes from making (likely valid) criticisms of caricatured groups. Middle ground should not be sought for its own sake, or else it becomes useless (akin to Goodhart's law; roughly "when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"). People should embrace a diversity of values, but the burden is to stay true to a set of values and push for the truth.
I don't agree with some points, but I share the feeling in terms of "failed promises".
The fact that most well-known Rust crates are becoming huge bloat are becoming a problem to me, which is something that has been critized years again by the community itself.
As an example, I still do not understand why simple HTTP crates require more than 50 to 70 dependencies to execute a simple GET call...
> As an example, I still do not understand why simple HTTP crates require more than 50 to 70 dependencies to execute a simple GET call...
Looking at ureq [0], for example, its direct non-build/non-dev dependencies are (counting duplicates):
- base64
- flate2 (4 transitive dependencies)
- log
- percent-encoding
- rustls (26 transitive dependencies)
- rustls-pki-types (1 transitive dependency)
- ureq-proto (7 transitive dependencies)
- utf-8
- webpki-roots (2 transitive dependencies)
The vast majority of the raw dependency count comes from Rustls and related crates, and I'd imagine reimplementing a TLS stack would be somewhat out of scope for an HTTP crate. I'm not sure there's much room for substantial reductions in dependency count otherwise.
So let me get this straight. You want the benefit of being able to re-use other peoples' codebase by using an HTTP crate you didn't write. But you don't want those people to also use that benefit of depending on other crates.
Insisting that you should depend on code which itself has no dependencies is a bit hypocritical if you ask me. If you want a simple HTTP crate that doesn't have dependencies, you should follow your own philosophy of not using other crates and write it yourself.
I think this is rather hostile. There is moderation from not using dependencies or from using too many dependencies. I don't think GP is advocating for no dependencies, either. Even vendoring and pinning dependencies provides benefits.
I think it's the perfect amount of hostility. People shouldn't complain about things given to them for free built by amateurs in their spare time. Including fewer dependencies adds more time to developer's effort. Including packages into std requires more work from the Rust team (mostly volunteers). If top comment isn't satisfied with the stuff given to them for free, they can make their own software.
Time functions are a prefect example of somewhere there should be expanded support for in the STD. I'm also of the opinion that there should be a generic and reasonable async runtime in STD, since having `async` in the language, but to direct way to use it without a crate or writing your own executor is awkward.
Then there are things like serialization and logging, which I like the idea of having promoted crates which are essentially just better advertised for newcomers. (Maybe included in the distribution already in some way).
But what if we did that 5 years ago? Oops. And even Java's API has problems too. Why not let it be provide by the ecosystem where it can qctually evolve?
It lacks a hybrid duration type. Instead, it splits durations into calendar and time durations and conflates the length of a `day` depending on whether it's in `Period` or `Duration`. And AFAIK, it doesn't support time zone aware duration rounding. And I don't see a way to compute a `Period` from two `ZonedDateTime` values in a way that respects time zone transitions.
To be clear, it's good. But there are mistakes that the Temporal project learned from and fixed.
(Temporal's single `Duration` type does have pros and cons, so I don't mean to frame having two distinct types as a strict negative. But it's very clunky.)
No, I think the idea of blessing a set of crates (with versions!) is better. The stdlib has a high burden of maintenance, and ideally should only be added to if changes are always backwards compatible. A blessed set is more flexible but still provides a high degree of reliability, unlike the present situation.
This whole idea of an "x replacement" doesn't make any sense in the first place. Language boundaries are not that strict. People say "Zig is a C replacement, Rust is a C++ replacement" but even Andrew Kelley himself says that Zig is a replacement for the C++ he was writing at the time. I work with a lot of C folks who never liked C++ who liked Rust.
Then these languages' developers and/or vocal users should not have used it.
Like you said, even Andrew Kelley said that Zig is a replacement for the C++. At the time. IIRC he kept going back and forth C and C++, although I may be wrong. I only remember him saying C++.
I haven't dabbled in rust since 2018, but if rust has managed to be as complicated as C++ while being a fraction of the age then I would think that would be some kind of macabre achievement in its own right.
But who is "they"? What does it mean to be "on the same side as Rust"? What if Rust maintainers disagree? Being on a side suggests an unwillingness to part ways, which is more commitment than merely agreeing to a set of beliefs at some time. If Rust is a worthy rock in the political sphere for the moment, then there is no trouble in believing alike, but only for the moment. Every actor should prove themselves constantly, not to be orbited.
>What does it mean to be "on the same side as Rust"?
There is a stated and auctioned stance the rust foundation poses, and they are saying they align with that. At this point if you can see their point the communication fault is yours.
>Being on a side suggests an unwillingness to part ways
No it doesn't.
>If Rust is a worthy rock in the political sphere for the moment
I have to assume their politics is more intimate to them than the maintainers of a programming language, and that they used it here because the conversation we are having is around rust.
You used "they" several times, so I took a certain usage to mean "Rust", and I was asking who specifically "Rust" entails. Who defines the "Rust beliefs"?
> > Being on a side suggests an unwillingness to part ways
"Suggests", as in, "it is likely implied that" (emphasis on "likely"), though I should've been more clear.
> I have to assume their politics is more intimate to them than the maintainers of a programming language, and that they used it here because the conversation we are having is around rust.
The primary topic is politics.
---
I find issue with the framing of "taking sides". I hear it and think of fragmentation for the sake of fragmentation. There is a distinct difference in saying "I side with Rust" and "I agree with Rust", the latter being reducible to "Rust believes [a belief]" and "I believe [the same belief]". The former can be used to mean the latter, but I choose to focus on the likely implication.
The biggest annoyance for me is that if you somehow say you use Rust and you make money, the community will descend upon you like vultures saying you need to donate. Honestly, they should just amend their license to be like the Meta Llama License since the community clearly desires that kind of thing greatly.
I do like Rust, but I steer clear of the community because of this tithe-seeking nonsense.
I don't give a damn about politics so I don't care what politics the language I use likes or not. If someone believes people should not exists because of their political or religious stance, sexuality or origin. We don't have a political problem we have one of morality and I don't compromise in that regard.
Edit: come on don't downvote explain your reasoning.
It's interesting to note that this doesn't actually discuss any funding details. Who, how much, when, how? The devil is always in the details.
Yea, this is just the "find money" side of things. We're figuring out the details of how to decide what/who to fund in parallel
If you go to the main page and scroll down a bit, you will see the big names having their logos hosted there...
The Rust Foundation is a 501(c)(6) and not a 501(c)(3). The Rust Foundation would do better for the community if they were a 501(c)(3) and more transparent about finances.
There is no need for a new fund, the existing funds should be directed towards development and there should be greater transparency about how funds are gathered and spent.
This post is devoid of details and action. It should read that the Rust Foundation is going to convert to a 501(c)(3) and ensure that current funds are spent on development. Otherwise, this is a shell game with the existing funds and how they are going to be spent. Understand that sleight of hand bodes poorly and suggest impropriety.
Why doesn't Zig attract the same sort of lukewarm response that Rust does from parts of communities?
Rust came first, so people who didn't like Rust flocked to Zig as an alternative, and were keen to promote it as an alternative to Rust by criticising Rust, as wider usage would provide them more of an ecosystem to use in their own Zig programs.
People who were happy with Rust didn't have same need to criticise Zig in online spaces as Rust is the established player in the C alternatives space. (Though Rust is on the other side when compared to C once you expand the space to "all low level programming languages").
Also for people who don't care about the space at all, Rust has had years of exposure to promote fatigue, while Zig hasn't (yet).
A bit of a tilted take.
Zig's BDFL was an early major supporter of Rust. It was Rust's core maintainer group who excluded him and warred against his language. The leaders decided any "memory unsafe" language was against "consensus"; first C, then Zig. They even posted on Twitter, calling Zig a "step backwards". This Language Supremacism was even worse in conferences and in private.
Today, you can see a lot of the core ex-leaders still sniping at at other language and even successful OSS projects based in those languages. The Zig community has its faults but Rust takes the cake for relentless gamesmanship.
The beef you're talking about here is between pcwalton and Andrew. Patrick posted those things after he had left Rust leadership.
Andrew and I literally got some tacos last week. I mean, I'm not in Rust leadership anymore either, but this sort of thing just isn't recognizable to me outside of, again, a few posts by one person who no longer even worked on Rust.
Yes, he was free to express his bigotry once he stepped down. Before that, Patrick was the leader and he hated non-memory-safe languages. He was not the only one, and that hate got worse after he left.
It's nice you got tacos with Zig's BDFL and I don't categorize you as a "hater". Rather, I think the Rust Core Group altogether was toxic. Unable to see their hate as hate, and having memories largely selective and largely untrustworthy.
> people who didn't like Rust flocked to Zig as an alternative, and were keen to promote it as an alternative to Rust by criticising Rust, as wider usage would provide them more of an ecosystem to use in their own Zig programs.
> People who were happy with Rust didn't have same need to criticise Zig in online spaces as Rust is the established player in the C alternatives space. (Though Rust is on the other side when compared to C once you expand the space to "all low level programming languages").
I think that this effect is...more real and intentional than I wish it was or think is healthy.
There's no denying that Rust benefited greatly from heavy "language evangelism" from around 2014-2022 or so (rough subjective range of dates, ending with when I feel like Rust became sufficiently mainstream that "comment section evangalism" is no longer the primary driver of the language's growth). The atmosphere that surrounded the language evangalism during this era -- from my recollection as someone who was aware of Rust but explicitly not interested in it at the time -- felt like one of curiousity and exploring new innovation in the programming language design space, and it didn't come across as pushy or some kind of moral imperative.
Additionally, most of the evangelism was not driven by the Rust project itself, but more of a grassroots thing from:
- Early users
- People who thought the language was interesting without having used it
- The attention that came from prolific early Rust projects like Servo and ripgrep
- The attention that came from the language's technical innovations
(The only person I remember regularly seeing in Rust threads who was actually associated with the project was Steve Klabnik, and I consider him a stellar example of how to represent a project online in a way that's respectful and not pushy or combative.) And eventually I had a programming task where, thanks to those deep, insightful, and respectful comment threads, I recognized that Rust was the right tool for the task I was trying to accomplish, learned the language myself, found it a joy to use, and began using it more regularly.
But once Rust became mainstream, the eternal September kicked in. Now there seem to be quite a lot of people who are more interested in "language wars" than in healthy, technical discussion of programming languages, and it's exhausting. Many threads about C or C++ or Rust or Zig or Fil-C or whatever seems to get overtaken by these obnoxious, repetitive, preachy, ideological comments about why you should or shouldn't be using Rust, often with very ill-informed armchair takes.
I think this is just something that comes from mainstream Internet culture and is not very representative of "the Rust community", and especially not the Rust project -- most of the serious writing and comments coming from people actually involved with Rust have that spirit of respect, openness, and curiousity about programming language design that I remember from the 2010's. A lot of people who work on Rust are deeply interested in the tradeoffs and innovations of new programming languages and fundamentally excited about the possibility of Rust becoming obsolete because something better has come along. But now that Rust adoption is increasing and the broader Internet culture is being forced to consider it, you see a lot of unhealthy reactionary takes from people who act like programming languages are a zero-sum game and they need to pick a side.
Now Zig is where this gets a little bit odd to me. My impression (as an outsider to the Zig community as well) is that Zig's leadership has chosen to view adoption as a zero-sum language war. It's as if they considered:
- How Rust benefited from language evangelism during the 2010's
- How many other "C-replacement" languages over the past 25 years have failed to gain large-scale adoption
- How "language war" discourse is extremely effective for enagement on places like HN
...and decided that the best way to increase Zig adoption is by intentionally leaning into that high-engagement "language war" discourse. Maybe it's not intentional -- and there's certainly a lot of cool ideas and high-quality technical discussion that comes out of the Zig community -- but I've also seen a consistent pattern of snarky or hostile comments from Zig leadership towards Rust people (such as calling Rust users "safety coomers", or jumping into in-depth technical discussions of Rust's downsides like compiler performance with substance-less cheap shots). Whereas I can't remember ever seeing anything but respect and curiosity from people involved in the Rust project towards other communities.
I'm just tired of seeing people draw battle lines around programming languages instead of promoting a spirit of learning from each other and making our tools better.
That's one hell of a post. I'm reading that Rust deserved to be evaluated on its technical merits (which I'm happy with), but Zig has some community issues in closer examination?
I've looked at the major rust implements from big corp. It's all Arc, copy/clone, and people getting fired.
I think that both languages deserve to be evaluated on their technical merits, of which there are many. I would say they are both very well-designed languages that occupy different points in the design space and each have unique innovations of their own, and are worthy of the attention they get. I also think both languages have strong communities and good technical leadership.
What I'm frustrated about is a general pattern in online discourse of treating programming language adoption as a zero-sum game and pitting the communities against each other. This is nothing remotely new -- holy wars over tooling are just about as old as computing itself -- but Rust seems to have become right at the center of it in the last few years, and I think this is likely just a result of it becoming "mainstream" enough for people to care about it outside of a niche circle. I consider that a community issue with Rust, but probably an unavoidable one given the scale of the Internet.
The thing that feels different to me about Zig is that the language's leadership participates in the "holy war", which is different than what I have observed from Rust's leadership. It's one thing if random netizens are trash talking the "opposing team" like a sports fan, but I would expect people who are deeply involved in programming language design and representing their community to know better and behave better than that. It's surprising and disappointing to me; it drags down the overall quality of discourse and sets a bad example for the language communities.
Maybe my own perspective on this is skewed, perhaps I'm looking at Rust's past with rose-tinted glasses. But I think my experiences are comparable. From 2015-2020 I was primarily working with Swift and closely following that language's design and development, and the Rust community (which I was not involved in at all) felt like friendly neighbors. The two communities shared similar goals and had a lot of like-minded people, and because of that there was a lot of overlap and amicability between the communities. Both languages' teams were frequently comparing notes and copying features from one another.
Now I'm primarily working with Rust and closely following that languages' design and development, and it seems to me like the Zig community (which I am not involved with at all) should be on the same friendly terms for the same reasons, but the vibes I see from them are "this town isn't big enough for the two of us", and I'm bothered by that.
> I've looked at the major rust implements from big corp. It's all Arc, copy/clone, and people getting fired.
I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. Are you saying you've seen projects implemented in Rust go poorly? If so, I don't know what to say without any context, besides that I don't think there's a "one size fits all" for programming languages.
Or are you saying big companies' contributions towards the Rust project itself have gone poorly? I don't really know what to say about that either. I have felt that the direction the project has taken over the past few years has represented me and addressed my needs well, so I have confidence in their technical direction and leadership for the time being.
Thank you for the kind words.
Agree with your take on Zig, as it's clear their leadership promotes a foul filled war on other C alternative languages. Not just Rust, but others like Vlang, Dlang, C3, etc... HN has become dominated by them, where other languages (outside of Rust and Zig), can get very little shine. When they do, their light often gets snuffed out quickly.
The perception of Zig and Rust within different communities can vary, and Zig may not attract the same level of "lukewarm response" as Rust due to several factors, including their design philosophies, target use cases, and community engagement.
Zig's appeal lies in its deliberate simplicity and explicitness, offering a different path to high-performance, low-level programming compared to Rust's safety-first, more complex approach. This divergence in philosophy and implementation leads to different reception within the programming community.
This will be anecdotal. However both in the academia and in the semi-professional space, I encountered certain type of programmer who is a bit more "religiously minded" (both in the technical space and quite often in their personal beliefs too). Unix, although being a quite commercial project, its academic origins attracted a kind of followers, who believe there is a certain purity we can reach with computers or software that's not bound to the practical and economic use-cases. This forms an identity and they tend to regard programmers who are in this ecosystem as gods or prophets. The origins of Unix is also mixed with the free software movement due to both academic origins and regarded as a one continuous movement.
C language is strongly tied to Unix ecosystem. C language and current compilers give this illusion of "ultimate control" to the programmers (although C has been interpreted quite freely for the sake of optimizations). With GNU C compiler finding a niche (i.e. being a free as in beer C compiler and a userland that's not bounded by the original Unix or BSD licensing / patents) and taking off in many servers the beliefs were kind of validated.
Rust attacks those beliefs in multiple fronts:
First and foremost, Rust comes from an inherent distrust to the programmer's abilities to write secure software. Rust creates strong obstacles against writing "magic" programs that freely interpret memory. Programmers are not treated as gods but fallible mortals who needed to be guided. Many C programmers interpret this as an insult to their abilities to manually check and verify a program. Rust is no less capable than C, it has all sorts of escape hatches that can be used in performance critical parts.
Rust compiler itself and the most of the programs written in Rust are permissively licensed. This is to avoid possible issues with copyleft licenses combined with statically linked binaries. Without having a stable ABI or ability to incorporate third party libraries post-build, GPL and LGPL create hurdles that doesn't exist in the mostly dynamically compiled world of C.
Rust has a more equal regard of the operating systems, including non-POSIX ones like Windows. Despite most people in the world interact with non-POSIX APIs the most, accepting it as another step.
Rust community tries its best to create a safe space for marginalized parts of the society. Go to any Rust conference and you'll see an over-representation of LGBTQ people. This probably rubs majorly white male subset of strongly identifying C programmers up wrong way.
The community also welcomes a bunch of different ways of thinking and questioning the basics of every single decision we made when we were building the systems of today.
Zig, on the other hand doesn't attack any of those "base principles". It fixes the most annoying parts of C programming: fluid integer types, really weak type system, hostile dependency management. It still trusts the programmer 100%. The default behavior is still unsafe.
People who choose Rust are also particularly worried about the security of the programs and they would like to prove and validate the language's existence and goals. They do that by reimplementing very popular and very senior projects in Rust and compare its performance and safety against existing C projects too. Many such projects have enjoyed a long time of no competition and now there is one.
Your comment is really quite interesting. Thanks! What you're saying all sounds plausible to me.
I note that, while different circles may call for "purity" (fans of, e.g., Unix, Lisp, or Haskell), I think honestly pursuing the purity of writing programs to achieve one's goals means rejecting dogmatism and accepting pragmatism. Adherence to beliefs is fine if, and only if, the beliefs are fundamentally justified....
It isn't all of the objection, but there is a non-neglible amount of anti-woke people who find some weak technical reason to hate rust. It's silly but you'll be amazed in how often you see it line up when checking a random sampling of people who show up in rust threads just to make off topic complaints about rust.
EDIT: I hadn't fully gone through the comment section on this one yet and yikes it's worse about it than normal.
Non-negligible from what perspective? Is this group of people somehow holding back unbridled adoption and enthusiasm for Rust? Is it possible for tech people to drum up excitement for a newer language without it being political just because you insist that it is?
> Non-negligible from what perspective?
Non-negligible in that it happens in almost every thread about rust. As in it isn't a rare occurrence.
I think I see most Rust threads here. Perhaps there is a low presence in most threads, but I didn't notice a significant rate as the baseline. Though this thread is burning up, certainly.
bit sad that I misread "Fund" in the title as "Feud" at first and didn't think anything of it
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Where were these things promised to you? I was there then too, and maybe one or two of these things were relevant if you squint, but also many of them were actively not promised.
> * With a great non-political community (actually, this is the biggest lie of all).
I recall the opposite, that the rust language (before the foundation) position was that being apolitical was a political stance. This is not the exact message I remember https://x.com/rustlang/status/1267519582505512960 and also can't realistically cover the entire community at large, as if that even has a single political stance.
The group that insists on keeping a community or software project 'non-political' often fails to recognize that this stance is itself a political position. They claim to want a neutral space, but what they really mean is that the existing political view does not align with their own. By dismissing other perspectives as 'political' while treating their own as neutral, they end up being both hypocritical and unwilling (or unable) to acknowledge that their opinions are political too.
I agree that those were not actually "promises" but "directions", and I apologise for that. Those directions were mainly cited in different conferences by some Rust-head-members at that time (Alex Crichton, Niko Matsakis, Ashley Williams, or even you), and during conversations I had with severals during Rust Fest or RustCon.
For example, I remember talking that with you at the Rust Fest 2017, in Zurich actually, especially about the *very early version* of Async/Await.
It is ok for the community to move on different directions than the first one, and I don't blame any of you for that.
Niko and Alex were the only ones in leadership in 2013, I didn't until 2014, and Ashley later. Rust Fest and Rust Con didn't come along until much later.
> It is ok for the community to move on different directions than the first one
I agree, I just disagree with your characterization of "the first one." There were differences between the original Rust and what shipped, but almost none of it has to do with what you've said. In 2012-2013, Rust very explicitly changed a lot across time, and now it certainly does not. Async/await drove a lot of that adoption. Rust was always "political", even before 2012.
Amazon fired every Rust project team member except Niko and weihanglo over the last year. Which is a major contributor to why the foundation started looking into funding maintainers
> non-political community
"Non-political community" is an oxymoron, like "non-aquatic lake". Politics is the verb that communities do.
Non-political almost always means "accept the social status quo I am used to".
I think there is a reasonable argument that the default for a community with technical goals should be to accept social status quo conventions unless they conflict with the communities technical goals. But if the social default is "girls don't code and queers should hide" there is a reasonable counterargument that these conflict with the goal of making the technology (and community) available to everyone.
> But if the social default is "girls don't code and queers should hide"
Queers should hide definitely isn't any social default unless the code is exclusively developed in Gaza. "Do what you like but please stick to technical considerations" isn't "you need to hide".
You seem to have read that as literally "hide if you are queer". What I meant to encompass was also "hide that you're queer". And that's absolutely a norm that exists, and that can perfectly well hide behind "stick to technical considerations". If you say "I prefer to be referred to by these pronouns" then the reply "please stick to technical considerations" is not neutral. If someone would point out @acronym_XYZ is actually a woman when someone referred to her as he, nobody would reply with "please stick to technical considerations". "Please stick to technical considerations" as a response to any behavior that is outside some societal default is not enforcing a technical concern, it's enforcing the societal default, including when there are no technical reasons to do so.
That doesn't mean that "Please stick to technical considerations" or quite simply "that's off-topic" are never valid. They very much are. It simply means that they don't provide some clean clear demarcation line around which to organize a technical community.
> If you say "I prefer to be referred to by these pronouns" then the reply "please stick to technical considerations" is not neutral.
There's no single societal norm in worldwide source projects; that's just you monolithing a diverse set of groups. In this particular instance if you're just a GitHub handle then whether you're female or you wish to be called "her" then that doesn't require hiding that you're "queer", but it also doesn't require mentioning it. Just say, "actually it's 'she'" and you're done.
I thought you merely misread my comment. But it really seems you are very determined to pretend that there are no reasons for people to hide that they are queer, which, given the current political climate, is just bizarre to me.
"Societal default" here doesn't explicitly mean laws.
I didn't mention laws. What do you mean?
I assumed you were talking about laws because the social default in places like the south of the US is definitely that visibly queer people should hide.
> "Non-political community" is an oxymoron
No it's not.
I'm an LGBT person with a trans partner and I find many codes of conduct to be chastising and purposefully finger pointing to conservative people.
A lot of them are basically, "your religious teachings or cultural upbringing aren't welcome here"
I don't agree with religious texts, but that's what you're wagging in their face with some of the CoCs.
Leave it at "don't be an asshole". It's that simple.
The current political climate, I feel, is a direct reaction to this.
A politically neutral space wouldn't permit religious people to harass trans or LGBT people, but it also wouldn't give anyone latitude to throw stones the other way either.
CoCs are "you're not welcome here at all".
Another thing: you always see language and project logos modified to bear the rainbow, trans, and BLM colors. You never see anything supporting Asians, white people, men, or Christians. If you did this, you would be called out as a racist. Which is so ironic.
Let's just get along and work together. Maybe we'll find more agreements amongst ourselves that way instead of trying to divide everyone into camps.
Some progressives are going to get very pissed off at this comment, but I grew up and live in the South. You can (and often must) work with people you don't agree with. It's not impossible to be friends either. You might wind up changing their mind, and they might wind up making you more tolerant as well.
I agree with you, although of course "don't be an asshole" is only simple to enforce in practice. In the current climate, I expect that people considered "conservative" will still be highly hostile to good faith (let alone not) enforcements.
No matter the person, it's really disappointing that we're still entrenched in the mentalities of tribalism, anti-intellectualism, "if you're not with us, you're against us", "an eye for an eye", "someone hurt me, so I'm going to hurt someone", and so on. And by "person", that includes me.
The Earth politics patch really can't come soon enough. How much do we pay the devs, again?
Just want to say I appreciate you publicly taking this stance (on what appears to be a non-throwaway account, no less). As a fellow LGBT person I feel so alienated from other progressive-leaning people and communities because of my belief in how those who don't share my beliefs should be treated.
When saying these things out loud can be social suicide, well, it means a lot to see someone else say it first. So thanks. I hope tolerance can come back into fashion.
This is all fun and games until a “politically neutral” decision is made by a programming language foundation to refer to all trans people using they/them. How would that make you feel?
The most politically neutral decision in this case would be to let people refer to others with whichever pronouns accord to the speaker's beliefs, without reprimand.
Morality partially stems from autonomy (in the sense that "I should be able to act as I please"). According to autonomy, a person should be able to act freely, and two people should be able to interact similarly. One person's policy will be judged by any other, who is free to act by a distinct policy. But autonomy alone doesn't make for a good person, or a good society. The other factor in morality is non-hypocrisy (in the sense that "I should act how I say I should act").
I've laid out a neutral response. Of course I have my personal beliefs, as one does, but I speak here without pretense. Believe what you will.
That is absolutely not politically neutral.
How not? This policy permits expression aligned with personal convictions without privileging one political position over another.
Yeah that's the fastest way to breed animosity in these communities. Insisting on calling someone by a name they don't use for themselves is extremely antagonistic.
r/programminglanguages has the right idea: put a pride flag in the logo and a lot of these problems just sort themselves out.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/comments/17gcv...And it does work out well, the discussions stay on topic, LGBTQ issues aren't really a community topic despite the flag. Here's how that works out in practice, from today:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/comments/1onr6...
Someone says "he", they're corrected with "she", and that's the end of it. In more toxic communities where people are encouraged to use whatever pronouns they want, that simple interaction because a whole thing, where eventually one person calls the other delusional, the other calls them a bigot, and then no one is talking about programming languages. It's an eternal struggle, and for many people who build and maintain programming languages, they prefer to kick out the bigot rather than be called delusional, so everyone can get back to talking about programming languages. Still, there are plenty of online spaces, especially language spaces, where LGBTQ people are made to feel excluded. People upset with the flag or pronouns can join one of those communities, and everyone is happy.
(If anyone is wondering what kind of comments, they're usually veiled or not so veiled threats along the lines of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45727677. If the mere presence of the flag keeps people like this out, that's fine by me.)
> Here's how that works out in practice, from today:
> Someone says "he", they're corrected with "she", and that's the end of it.
This is a good example of conversational flow in an environment where people are not reprimanded for referring to others with pronouns that accord to the speaker's personal worldview. One person says "he", another person says "she", and everyone tolerates this difference of expression whether they agree with it or not.
Essentially it's the most politically neutral stance on pronouns, as implemented in an everyday conversation.
You would consider that decision politically neutral?
So you can see why they put it in scare quotes. Just above your reply another says it's politically neutral to adopt whatever pronouns the speaker feels is valid, and not punish them for it. This is "neutral" in that it sides with the speaker regardless of who they are, but is clearly designed to allow bigots to misgender freely. That is the point, "neutral" is not so trivially defined, and often falls on the side of more conservative societal trends.
Thank you, this is exactly what I was getting at.
What would you consider to be truly politically neutral, then? Because it seems we're in agreement that a decision to "refer to all trans people using they/them" would not fit the bill. But whether it's politically neutral or not, it's unnecessarily exclusionary; that's what I take issue with.
(for the record I do realize the phrase 'politically neutral' is vague and unclear, and often used as a conservative dogwhistle, which is why I generally avoid it)
An example of the sort of Code of Conduct I personally feel is the most inclusive and 'politically neutral' in a non-scare-quotes-dogwhistle way is the Hacker News guidelines[0]. I think the moderation in general here does a good job of promoting open discussion across people from a wide variety of backgrounds.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> that's what you're wagging in their face with some of the CoCs.
I never mentioned codes of conduct in my comment.
Those are orthogonal to the observation that communities are fundamentally political.
> Leave it at "don't be an asshole". It's that simple.
Sure, and "don't be an asshole" is a political statement. The subjects and objects of that sentence are people and the intent is to affect how they interact.
If you feel that that's the kind of thing that community members should write down and say to each other, then you're implicitly agreeing with my claim that politics is what communities do.
I suspect you think you and I would disagree with what politics a community should espouse, but that's not my point at all. All I'm saying is that every community, every group of people coordinating together, is a political beast. It's true of an anarcho-syndalistic art collective from Portland who only communicate through crypto-signed commits on their self-hosted fork of Fossil, it's true of a gang of skinhead bikers meeting regularly at a dive bar, and it's true of the Rust community.
When people regularly interact with each other and communicate about how they should interact... they are politicking. "Politics" has become a bad word for some people, but it's the less bad word we have available to describe what it is people are doing when they are establishing the norms and practices of their regular repeated interactions.
> A lot of them are basically, "your religious teachings or cultural upbringing aren't welcome here"
Could you point out a code of conduct -- preferably from a large, well known project -- that reads this way in your opinion?
> You can (and often must) work with people you don't agree with.
Life's for too short to force people to do this, and ideally we should make it as feasible as possible for as many people as possible to never have to do this.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45819079 (read my comment here first)
Not quite your fault, but the framing of "people you don't agree with" juxtaposed with the implicit statement of "people who promote hate" (or similar) doesn't make for a clear discussion. To be clear, those two types are well separated. If someone is of the latter type, really truly they are, then they can be removed without further ado (and I think GP would agree). I think the situations that are less clear cut will make people in good faith fight.
This is a crazy notion. If I have to like everybody to work with them, we can't have a civilization because I don't like most people.
I like some people. Everybody else I work with if they're willing to work with me. Saying that we all have to agree with each other is basically giving up on the political project entirely, and going back to strongman rulers who organize by demanding conformity. Very relevant in these times.
> we should make it as feasible as possible for as many people as possible to never have to do this.
No, we should make it impossible to avoid so people can't sneak into adulthood without being properly socialized.
There is a wide gulf between "I don't like this person" and "this person's whole existence should be a crime".
I think that many people leaning toward the latter are "merely" misguided, though I certainly don't think that to correct them would be easy. However, I genuinely think some people are taken to be hateful when they aren't. Discussion of such cases should not be taken with the presumption that the accusations of hate are true, because then truth gives way to opinion. A good cause is a good cause, but realization invites bias.
Nope. I won't work with people who think my friends shouldn't exist. And I won't work with people who think doing that is somehow childish.
> people who think my friends shouldn't exist
What does this mean? Are you talking about people who openly support actual murder? Almost everyone is opposed to that, of course.
College athlete Lia Smith died by suicide last week after years of targeted harassment and attacks from the people we're talking about. At some point, when the institutions of power do everything they can to demonize your existence, strip you of your accomplishments, and vilify you publicly—across millions of people nationwide—it doesn't matter whether you call it murder or not. The deaths rack up all the same.
Perhaps it would be best not to spread unverified speculation about possible reasons for someone choosing to die by suicide.
There was no speculation about a causal relationship in the post you're replying to
In fact, by my reading, that post is saying that the actual cause is immaterial in the face of campaigning that essentially tried to be the cause.
Imagine the flip side. We could easily wind up in that world too.
The best defense against polarization is a strong and cohesive middle ground.
If you pull to far in the other way, all the bonds break. And it's a race for each interest group to seize power, rather than having some intermediating force that serves as a buffer.
Again: look at the political climate. It's a reaction. The pendulum is swinging harder and harder because we've given up on the middle ground.
Most of the people you hate (and you do seem to dislike them at least a little bit) have honestly never had an LGBT friend. Imagine if they did how that might change them.
Instead they hear voices from the LGBT community that want to outlaw them and their way of life. That's pretty hostile. And definitely is going to be met with the same attitude you're giving them.
I'm LGBT and I have many conservative friends. They're more apt to come around to it than you believe. You're shutting down any conversation before it can even happen.
> Instead they hear voices from the LGBT community
Oftentimes, the voices are outside.
I think you're somewhat optimistic, and "the middle ground" is not a magical place. It's easy to fall into a false sense of security that comes from making (likely valid) criticisms of caricatured groups. Middle ground should not be sought for its own sake, or else it becomes useless (akin to Goodhart's law; roughly "when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"). People should embrace a diversity of values, but the burden is to stay true to a set of values and push for the truth.
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I don't agree with some points, but I share the feeling in terms of "failed promises".
The fact that most well-known Rust crates are becoming huge bloat are becoming a problem to me, which is something that has been critized years again by the community itself.
As an example, I still do not understand why simple HTTP crates require more than 50 to 70 dependencies to execute a simple GET call...
> As an example, I still do not understand why simple HTTP crates require more than 50 to 70 dependencies to execute a simple GET call...
Looking at ureq [0], for example, its direct non-build/non-dev dependencies are (counting duplicates):
- base64
- flate2 (4 transitive dependencies)
- log
- percent-encoding
- rustls (26 transitive dependencies)
- rustls-pki-types (1 transitive dependency)
- ureq-proto (7 transitive dependencies)
- utf-8
- webpki-roots (2 transitive dependencies)
The vast majority of the raw dependency count comes from Rustls and related crates, and I'd imagine reimplementing a TLS stack would be somewhat out of scope for an HTTP crate. I'm not sure there's much room for substantial reductions in dependency count otherwise.
[0]: https://github.com/algesten/ureq
So let me get this straight. You want the benefit of being able to re-use other peoples' codebase by using an HTTP crate you didn't write. But you don't want those people to also use that benefit of depending on other crates.
Insisting that you should depend on code which itself has no dependencies is a bit hypocritical if you ask me. If you want a simple HTTP crate that doesn't have dependencies, you should follow your own philosophy of not using other crates and write it yourself.
I think this is rather hostile. There is moderation from not using dependencies or from using too many dependencies. I don't think GP is advocating for no dependencies, either. Even vendoring and pinning dependencies provides benefits.
I think it's the perfect amount of hostility. People shouldn't complain about things given to them for free built by amateurs in their spare time. Including fewer dependencies adds more time to developer's effort. Including packages into std requires more work from the Rust team (mostly volunteers). If top comment isn't satisfied with the stuff given to them for free, they can make their own software.
> As an example, I still do not understand why simple HTTP crates require more than 50 to 70 dependencies to execute a simple GET call...
This is what you get with package managers.
I think it's clear to me that Rust needs to start admitting more into the STD to help with this and increase the consistency across the ecosystem.
This has happened already. See https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/cell/struct.LazyCell.html
It's just it's not frequent.
There is very few things that need to be in the standard library. I only ever miss chrono or equivalent not being in std.
Time functions are a prefect example of somewhere there should be expanded support for in the STD. I'm also of the opinion that there should be a generic and reasonable async runtime in STD, since having `async` in the language, but to direct way to use it without a crate or writing your own executor is awkward.
Then there are things like serialization and logging, which I like the idea of having promoted crates which are essentially just better advertised for newcomers. (Maybe included in the distribution already in some way).
If Chrono were in std, that would have been a disaster IMO.
Not exactly chrono crate (to quote "chrono or equivalent"). More like Java's version of chrono.
But what if we did that 5 years ago? Oops. And even Java's API has problems too. Why not let it be provide by the ecosystem where it can qctually evolve?
What problems does Java JSR 310 have (old Java time yes, but those are known issues)? As far as I have used it, it was damn near perfect.
It lacks a hybrid duration type. Instead, it splits durations into calendar and time durations and conflates the length of a `day` depending on whether it's in `Period` or `Duration`. And AFAIK, it doesn't support time zone aware duration rounding. And I don't see a way to compute a `Period` from two `ZonedDateTime` values in a way that respects time zone transitions.
To be clear, it's good. But there are mistakes that the Temporal project learned from and fixed.
(Temporal's single `Duration` type does have pros and cons, so I don't mean to frame having two distinct types as a strict negative. But it's very clunky.)
No, I think the idea of blessing a set of crates (with versions!) is better. The stdlib has a high burden of maintenance, and ideally should only be added to if changes are always backwards compatible. A blessed set is more flexible but still provides a high degree of reliability, unlike the present situation.
This has been tried a few times, and in practice, people prefer the current status quo.
I'm not aware of the attempts, but at least the route of adding more to the stdlib seems even worse, although it may be popular.
Oh yeah, I would agree with that for sure.
> A programming language simpler than C++..
That made me chuckle because both are quite the behemoths, as I have previously said. If they promised this, it was a lie indeed.
I have to disagree. Rust is not even close to behemothness of C++.
Perhaps, but it is definitely not a C replacement, but a replacement of C++.
I think Rust primarily being a C++ replacement has been acknowledged ever since it was considered for use in Firefox.
This whole idea of an "x replacement" doesn't make any sense in the first place. Language boundaries are not that strict. People say "Zig is a C replacement, Rust is a C++ replacement" but even Andrew Kelley himself says that Zig is a replacement for the C++ he was writing at the time. I work with a lot of C folks who never liked C++ who liked Rust.
Then these languages' developers and/or vocal users should not have used it.
Like you said, even Andrew Kelley said that Zig is a replacement for the C++. At the time. IIRC he kept going back and forth C and C++, although I may be wrong. I only remember him saying C++.
It’s hard to argue with that. However, I don’t see how it’s relevant to this particular discussion.
I haven't dabbled in rust since 2018, but if rust has managed to be as complicated as C++ while being a fraction of the age then I would think that would be some kind of macabre achievement in its own right.
Both are, indeed, and I don't know if this was ever promised, but Rust is way simpler than C++ (today, at least).
Everything is political, people are picking sides, and I'm on the same side as Rust
Is "Rust" a homogeneous blob of beliefs that you can side with?
They didn't imply it's a homogeneous blob, but if they have beliefs they state and enact one can agree with those.
But who is "they"? What does it mean to be "on the same side as Rust"? What if Rust maintainers disagree? Being on a side suggests an unwillingness to part ways, which is more commitment than merely agreeing to a set of beliefs at some time. If Rust is a worthy rock in the political sphere for the moment, then there is no trouble in believing alike, but only for the moment. Every actor should prove themselves constantly, not to be orbited.
>But who is "they"?
The person you're replying to.
>What does it mean to be "on the same side as Rust"?
There is a stated and auctioned stance the rust foundation poses, and they are saying they align with that. At this point if you can see their point the communication fault is yours.
>Being on a side suggests an unwillingness to part ways
No it doesn't.
>If Rust is a worthy rock in the political sphere for the moment
I have to assume their politics is more intimate to them than the maintainers of a programming language, and that they used it here because the conversation we are having is around rust.
> > But who is "they"?
You used "they" several times, so I took a certain usage to mean "Rust", and I was asking who specifically "Rust" entails. Who defines the "Rust beliefs"?
> > Being on a side suggests an unwillingness to part ways
"Suggests", as in, "it is likely implied that" (emphasis on "likely"), though I should've been more clear.
> I have to assume their politics is more intimate to them than the maintainers of a programming language, and that they used it here because the conversation we are having is around rust.
The primary topic is politics.
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I find issue with the framing of "taking sides". I hear it and think of fragmentation for the sake of fragmentation. There is a distinct difference in saying "I side with Rust" and "I agree with Rust", the latter being reducible to "Rust believes [a belief]" and "I believe [the same belief]". The former can be used to mean the latter, but I choose to focus on the likely implication.
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The biggest annoyance for me is that if you somehow say you use Rust and you make money, the community will descend upon you like vultures saying you need to donate. Honestly, they should just amend their license to be like the Meta Llama License since the community clearly desires that kind of thing greatly.
I do like Rust, but I steer clear of the community because of this tithe-seeking nonsense.
I don't give a damn about politics so I don't care what politics the language I use likes or not. If someone believes people should not exists because of their political or religious stance, sexuality or origin. We don't have a political problem we have one of morality and I don't compromise in that regard.
Edit: come on don't downvote explain your reasoning.