Bro wtf is happening at rust. How does a programming language have this much drama WEEKLY
Why I Left Rust
441–450 of 880 posts
Re: Why I Left Rust
#442Wait. Let me get this straight. Someone is an expert in this field. They're asked to speak at RustConf after a leadership vote. They've also written an article about reflection in Rust - a purely technical thing that is already pretty widely disliked conceptually. (EDIT: the talk was about this, but it's also compile time reflection and came with the usual disclaimer that it was not representative of any of the Rust…
Bad play Rust
Declining a keynote because you disagree with it just works to highlight a lack of welcoming of diverse viewpoints in the community. Having a perspective highlighted you disagree with would actually show how open and welcoming the community is.
This assumes of course the person was not making promises on behalf of the project to the community (who knows maybe they were?) but rather expressing their own opinions.
Having a keynote is not some endorsement that this is the future direction of the project.
Re: Why I Left Rust
#443First, the entire moderator team (BurntSushi et el) resigned citing inappropriate actions of a Rust core team member (details were not made public). Now JT resigns for a similar reason. Rust project governance has been a problem for a while and it seems to be getting worse.
Re: Why I Left Rust
#444Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm generally not a fan of the way people go about D&I, but the fact JeanHeyd has brought up the problem before makes it more pertinent. Whoever on the Rust team made the decision to reach out and downgrade JeanHeyd's talk seems extremely incompetent. Optics matter a lot here and a large portion of leadership roles is optics. It's careless to not take context into account, like the recent history of poor Rust-related…
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Considering Elon an "effective leader" is certainly a take.
Re: Why I Left Rust
#445Earlier quoted context omitted.
Much less weight should be given to someone "feeling uncomfortable" Rust the language is pretty good but the community around it has become really off-putting. The thick veneer of empathy and compassion quickly devolves into "idiot compassion" and emotional blackmail. Even the linked post contains the following: "I left because when I felt JeanHeyd's pain and disappointment at being mistreated and betrayed, my heart…
I thought "rust culture" came out of this sort of super SJW/woke culture of mozilla? Nothing against that sort of mindset in theory, but it sometimes leads to a certain irrational hypersensitive intolerant mob behavior and authoritarian/anti democratic tendencies. There was also the recent easily preventable drama [1] around the trademark guidelines some people left rust over. I don't really find any of this drama co…
> Nothing against that sort of mindset in theory, but it sometimes leads to a certain irrational hypersensitive intolerant mob behavior and authoritarian/anti democratic tendencies.
Really? Nothing against a thing that leads to hypersensitive intolerant mob behavior and authoritarian/anti democratic tendencies!?
Re: Why I Left Rust
#446Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a very clearly disgruntled senior member of the community who has just ragequit, following which they wrote a lament about their broken heart and their copious weeping over the intolerable cruelty of a withdrawn keynote invitation. It might be worth asking for a bit of evidence of their claims, given their penchant for melodramatic overstatement.
> It's a very clearly disgruntled senior member of the community who has just ragequit That’s leaving out the important context that it’s just the latest in a string of senior members in that community who have been disgruntled enough to quit. The entire moderation team quit all at the same time. Since then the leadership team has been “an interim leadership”. Rust governance has been an ongoing shitshow for at least…
Well other languages are just programing languages, they are not virtuous like Rust. And I am not just overstating it. In so many contexts Rust people come swinging at whoever not using or competing with Rust, are not just making bad technical choice (still debatable) but morally lacking.
Re: Why I Left Rust
#447Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What is this world we're building? It's the same as the world that existed before. A hundred years ago I would be going to mass on Sunday just so people thought I was a good Christian. Now I nod my empty head in fake agreement to all the "progressive" nonsense being spewed in professional circles. Well, except here. This is essentially a throwaway account with no ties to my professional self. "Give the man a mask a…
You're basically correct. The frustration many of us have, largely people slightly older than the core HN crowd, is that for a brief moment in the 90s and early 2000s we didn't have any of this dogma that could demand you nod along. You could be openly gay, openly Christian, conservative, leftist, or apolitical. There were groups that still tried, but they were all too weak. The cultural conservativism of the 80s had…
I think that's mostly true. The rise of New Atheism seemed to coincide with the start of decreased tolerance. Coincidence or cause, I'm not sure.
Re: Why I Left Rust
#448Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Rust community (in aggregate; I'd hope I wouldn't need to state the obvious that it doesn't apply to all individuals, but...Rust community) fosters this sort of melodrama. There is a core of extremely zealous "Rust wins all the things" types who don't stop at advocating for a language on its technical merits: they have to belittle and berate users of other languages because their choice (or not: employment is wha…
Its just so odd to me. It used to be that a language was like an impartial technology that could be evaluated. Back in the day would anybody ever say "wow those C++ people are noxious, I'm not going to use objects".
> It used to be that a language was like an impartial technology that could be evaluated.
In the era of open source and package managers, this can only be an illusion. It's sort of possible to ignore the community, but if nothing else it will affect the volume and quality of packages available for you. That said, you can keep it pretty minimal, you don't really need to interact beyond reading docs and downloading packages.
Re: Why I Left Rust
#449Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, open source is just like this now. I think it's a confluence of factors: 1) Open source is more about interpersonal collaboration than it ever has been. The lone hacker throwing tarballs -- or patches -- over the fence is dead. Open source projects now more closely resemble "real world" software projects: a team of engineers using collaborative tools, working toward a defined shared vision with management and ove…
Holy crap. How do I shield myself from this political bullshit and keep simply coding?
meditating on the void does it for me :)
Re: Why I Left Rust
#450Earlier quoted context omitted.
While the language itself looks fine, I find the community a bit off-putting. First the thing with the code of conduct and all that, that I think distracts from the technical questions. It is important to be inclusive, as not to exclude people who could make valuable contributions, but if it becomes a topic of argument, then it becomes counter-productive. The second is the "rewrite it in Rust" crowd. I mean, no langu…
> While the language itself looks fine, I find the community a bit off-putting I have wondered now and then about how the Rust community culture might have damaged the language. In particular, I've said for many years that Rust botched error handling by eschewing exceptions yet including panics anyway, leading to a doubling of the error handling infrastructure (you pay for both error objects and stack unwinding suppo…
> Did Rust end up with both errors and panics because the community suppressed robust debate in the name of kindness and "safety"? Was the current approach a way to try to make everyone happy without conflict?
I've been hanging around /r/rust and poking at other venues since at least 2013 and my understanding was that the exception-like appearance of panics arose organically from:
1. Let's have monadic error handling for catchable stuff and an ASSERT equivalent for bugs that cannot be reasonably handled.
2. Our ownership system and mutex poisoning allows us to make strong guarantees about where invalid state is observable. Let's let a thread ASSERT without taking down the whole program.
3. It'd be nice to have RAII cleanup on an ASSERT
4. It'd be nice to have automatic diagnostics on an ASSERT failure
5. Gee, it's really awkward to have to spawn a thread in order to be able to translate an ASSERT failure into an error code when we're exposing a C API from Rust code. Let's add catch_unwind. (std::panic::catch_unwind didn't get stabilized until Rust 1.9.)
The clearest expression of this is that libraries cannot opt back into unwinding when the application that depends on them sets panic=abort. If an application says "I have no need to continue with the following job/request/etc. after a programming error in a single unit of work", the libraries it depends on aren't allowed to countermand that and, if they try, it's their fault for abusing panics. Panics are overgrown ASSERTs, not an underbuilt exception system.