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A Sad Day for Rust

words.steveklabnik.com

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Re: A Sad Day for Rust

#181

Post by brianzelip »

I'm just a js dev with a whole lotta love for the web. I know enough to respect the hell out of Rust. I'd just like to offer my best wishes to the Rust community, and put a call for folks to be more civil on places like reddit, etc.

In closing, here's a nice little gem from the OP author's final blog post on his old blog[0]:

> if there’s one thing I’ve learned from writing software, it’s to blog about error messages.

Cheers.

[0] http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2015-07-05-ember-data--ds...

Re: A Sad Day for Rust

#182

Post by Traster »

I think one part of this problem is that people need to mind their own business. If you're using an open source project and you find a bug then fine, report it. Hell, maybe even do a PR for a fix. But the you're not the maintainer's boss, they don't owe you a fix, they don't owe you anything. Now here's where it goes wrong, it's not your business to go and call someone out on social media. Not least because when you post on social media you should know that you're inviting a lot of strangers who have nothing to do with your problem to come and get angry. A decade ago maybe you could've feigned ignorance. Not today.

Equally, if you see someone complaining on social media about something that doesn't effect you, then mind your own business. But let's be clear - most people can't be trusted to do that.

Social media has taught everyone that they get to have an opinion about everything, and not just to have an opinion but to go and find the people involved and tell them. That is a completely broken culture- and its actively encouraged by places like reddit and twitter.

Re: A Sad Day for Rust

#183

Post by jasonlotito »

jimbokun wrote: post #96
manish_gill wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No one expects you to write perfect code, but we do expect you to fix flaws when you learn about them. It's not like he was getting paid to work on this, was it? And people do have a life beyond open source. People could have forked and worked on the issues themselves, but that's asking too much. Why do the hard work when you can just write a comment/tweet blaming someone else, right? Your comment is precisely what…

Ok, so here is the article Klabnik cites, comparing various Rust HTTP clients: https://medium.com/@shnatsel/smoke-testing-rust-http-clients... Skimming this, the author doesn't really like any of them. Note, however, the long list of issues reported at the end of the article. Here is the first one I clicked on: https://github.com/algesten/ureq/issues/24 The maintainer is happy to get the report, and has an exchange w…

You might have missed a couple lines. It's easy to miss as it's right below the quote from the article mentioned: "This causes the now-usual Reddit uproar. It’s extra nasty this time. Some people go far, far, far over the line."

The issue isn't the article or the bug reports. It's the uproar from Reddit, and the extra nasty comments.

"Some people go far, far, far over the line."

There is a reason HN has guidelines for how to approach communication. It's because if we "go far, far, far over the line" and get "extra nasty" things devolve and this place becomes far worse. Rather than "toughen up" or "just not taking things personally," HN realizes that words matter.

Like I said, a couple lines easily missed or forgotten. It's not the bug reports. It's the extra nasty comments.

Re: A Sad Day for Rust

#184

Post by einpoklum »

ridaj wrote: post #4

It brings up the question — as a developer, how can you best set boundaries on your customers so that you can have some degree of control over the toxicity of the culture that you're exposed to when interacting with them?

As a person, can you set these boundaries for other people in your surroundings? Not yourself. Neither is that the case for developers.

Individuals can't force societal behavior; it's a social/group issue.

Re: A Sad Day for Rust

#185

Post by fortran77 »

tasogare wrote: post #135
fortran77 wrote: post #75

The Rust community is very, very toxic. They fight internally, but externally, they take over any thread about anything and make it about Rust.

Was here to post something along this line. The only place in which I'm (hopefully) in contact with the Rust community is here. What do I see all the time? - "rewrite it in Rust" kind of posts on a lot of threads - upvoting Rust mildly or not interesting projects just because there are written in Rust - down voting every comment that even slightly criticize Rust (this comment will be gray when you'll read it) or remi…

I am _very_ productive in GC languages. I use F# and C# all the time, and the code runs fast, everywhere. And I don't have to worry about memory, and don't have to learn a wacky syntax and wait for hours for a "borrow checker" to complete its static analysis.

Re: A Sad Day for Rust

#186

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

lallysingh wrote: post #111
TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like there should have been some sort of response from the maintainer about the _philosophy_ of why he was doing things the was he was, and people could either get onboard with the connecting points of that, or get lost. So far, in all of this drama, I have yet to see where any of that might have been explained. I don't use Rust, but I understand the significance of the experiment, and I think I for one, would…

Why is the maintainer responsible for that? They're just another dev who wrote something that became popular. It's almost like watching lottery winners having their lives ruined.

> Why is the maintainer responsible for that?

It just seems to me that there's a give-and-take to being the maintainer of a popular open source project. You get help on the project in the form of people contributing patches, right? Doesn't simple human curtesy and a modicum of wisdom suggest that you should explain your rationale in accepting or rejecting them, to manage expectations, so that it doesn't end up like this? I know, I know. I'm taking my crazy pills again. Sorry.

Re: A Sad Day for Rust

#187

Post by archsurface »

What I see: unsafe should be used sparingly, and it turns out there is a crowd-sourced safe-guard to ensure it. Don't cross the threshold.

Be warned: unsafe causes both bugs and anxiety - excessive use will lead to at least one biting you.

Re: A Sad Day for Rust

#188

Post by btrask »

If your language promises some kind of new feature (e.g. "safety") but offers a back door you could drive a truck through (e.g. 'unsafe'), then ensuring that back door is used appropriately and in good taste comes down to culture policing, which, as we've learned in other areas, is something the internet does not handle well.

As the Rust community grows, how can it ensure that people use 'unsafe' tastefully? Well, in general, it can't. But maybe Cargo could exercise some editorial control, and delist (or flag) packages that don't follow the "community standards". I'm not saying this would be a good idea, it's a tradeoff. But you can't force open source volunteers to write code in a way you like.

Re: A Sad Day for Rust

#189

Post by elefantastisch »

ddevault wrote: post #38

A lot of this thread has it wrong, and this wrongness contributes to the problem which led to this. I have two simple mantras which establish my philosophy here: 1. YOU are responsible for your dependencies. 2. Open source participants are volunteers and owe you nothing. It was never Nikolay's job to vet actix-web for you, nor did it become his job when the library became popular, nor does invoking "security" change…

Meta-comment:

Thank you. Online discussion would be much more productive if everyone clearly laid out the principles on which their viewpoint was based.

Fundamentally, there are only a few ways honest people can disagree: Different principles, different information, different interpretation, or just plain misunderstanding. (Meta-meta: This is the principle that I believe and based this comment on.)

Much of what makes online (and offline) arguments so unproductive is confusion over where exactly people are disagreeing in the first place. There's no point in discussing whether someone did the right or wrong thing if you don't even agree on the principles by which that rightness or wrongness will be judged.

If I disagree with one of your principles, we need the discussion to be at that level, or more likely, we simply must agree to disagree. If I think there's another principle you aren't considering, we can debate its relevance. If you're missing key information, I can provide it. If you're misinterpreting something, I can offer my alternate interpretation and justification for why I think it's better. In any case, if I disagree, it's clear how to proceed because your line of reasoning is clear. We can engage in a productive discussion without talking past each other.

As it stands, I agree with you 100%, but more importantly, you have raised the bar for discussion on this contentious issue. Thank you again.

Re: A Sad Day for Rust

#190

Post by K0nserv »

xamuel wrote: post #149
einpoklum wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was never Nikolay's job to vet actix-web for you Perhaps, but if he claimed that it _was_ vetted, then he took on some responsibility for it (which he probably should not have). Also, the blog post article claims, that you are never supposed to use "unsafe" code without having vetted it. Honestly, I doubt that very much, but if it's true than that's some responsibility taken too.

If a fundamental plank in rust's safety platform involves "apply the honor system to random people on the internet who swear they've vetted something", then that's a problem.

That’s not true, the convention is to annotate unsafe blocks with a comment explaining why the code is in fact safe. There are even projects that automate looking for these
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