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Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

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Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

#311
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's about effective advocacy. Stallman can think or do whatever he wants, but he is not and has never been an effective advocate. And from an advocacy position, ideological purity almost never works. An advocacy organisation like the FSF should be pragmatically "climbing the ladder" one step at a time, not insisting on an instantaneous revolution. You might as well advocate for the moon to be painted blue: it's just…

> Stallman can think or do whatever he wants, but he is not and has never been an effective advocate. Stallman has been right more often then wrong and has made his points forcefully, consistent and without compromise over decades . He's backed up his words with his deeds, has contributed an incredible amount of software and has been a very important factor in jumpstarting the free software movement. He provided a fr…

Not inducing the backlash effect, probably.

I have spent too long being right but an arsehole. I never got my ideas into production that way, even though the existing codebase was patently a trough of piss. I learned to stfu and, generally, they came round. Don't rub people's noses in it, especially if they make decisions you care about.

There is almost no issue so black-and-white that a person can't find a technical justification for any given point of view. So don't drive people to oppose you from simple bloody-mindedness.

Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

#312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree, but C/C++ are excusable for being named before any internet search engines existed at all. The other two…well, either viewpoint would have excellent arguments pro/con.

At least with Go you can use "Golang" in search and get reasonable results. With Rust, I often have to write "rust programming language + [what im searching for]" which is really annoying. Not sure if anyone ever dubs Rust to "Rustlang".

The website is literally rust-lang.org.

Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

#314
post #35

For anyone critizing this: From the trademark bullshit to the conference drama, it's clear at this point that someone with influence in the Rust foundation is behaving like an asshole and damaging the project. That can happen in open source, see Stallman and others. It's also clear that others at the Rust foundation tolerate this behavior, downplay it, don't understand the impact, don't want to go against a "respecte…

The Rust Foundation (responsible for trademark drama) and the Rust Project (at fault for conference drama) are separate entities.

Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

#315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ideological purity is the point. A whole range of other options are available but ideological purity is what Stallman offers, with no expectation that everyone will appreciate its benefits. The very existence of the FSF's offerings is necessary to understand what other positions compromise to obtain other benefits.

> Ideological purity is the point. Can a person be ideologically pure and not be an asshole? Or do the two go together (as is alleged with Stallman)?

The Dalai Lama. Perhaps Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn?

Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

#316
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's about effective advocacy. Stallman can think or do whatever he wants, but he is not and has never been an effective advocate. And from an advocacy position, ideological purity almost never works. An advocacy organisation like the FSF should be pragmatically "climbing the ladder" one step at a time, not insisting on an instantaneous revolution. You might as well advocate for the moon to be painted blue: it's just…

Unfortunately I don't even believe Stallman is as ideologically pure as people like too believe he is. I think he is much more attached to his own ideas and realisations than he is to the overarching idea of software freedom. And to support that argument I bring three anecdotes. 1. He is much more attached to his own creation, the GPL, as a tool for driving software freedom and as a "hack" on top of copyright. As suc…

Yes, I agree; that's what I meant with "ego-centric". [1] is a good example: "It is OK to call it GNU when you want to be really short, but it is better to call it GNU/Linux so as to give Torvalds some credit". Seriously? Calling some Linux distro "GNU" is "OK"? How gracious that he wants to give this little upstart student from Finland "some credit" as well.

As for microcode: IMHO Stallman is just wrong about it. He's okay with the logic being in hardware or non-volatile ROM, but uploading the code to volatile RAM when the hardware starts is a huge problem? I don't follow that logic. Of course it would be better if this was open, but it's much less of a deal than he makes it out to be.

[1]: https://www.gnu.org/gnu/incorrect-quotation.html

Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

#317

Honestly this bomb was waiting to burst for a long time now. Rust has aligned politically instead of just being a cool language. Bringing politics into something unrelated which brings people together is always a recipe for disaster.

But… the people who made it brought the politics. They own it. Rust is also not a cool language. You can not be cool and fuss about soundness and memory safety at the same time. It is mutually exclusive.

Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

#318
post #35

For anyone critizing this: From the trademark bullshit to the conference drama, it's clear at this point that someone with influence in the Rust foundation is behaving like an asshole and damaging the project. That can happen in open source, see Stallman and others. It's also clear that others at the Rust foundation tolerate this behavior, downplay it, don't understand the impact, don't want to go against a "respecte…

The Rust Foundation (responsible for trademark drama) and the Rust Project (at fault for conference drama) are separate entities.

[deleted]

Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

#320

Interesting, how many negative comments this gets. People seem to love monoculture run by committees. This is exactly what OSS is all about. Take a code base and develop it into different directions. Both code and organization. And "natural selection" will have some forks die and others strife.

I like languages that are a monoculture. It's a mess when you have many flavors of a language. Anyone else here remember the joy of various Fortran variants? It was a pain in the ass - VMS Fortran, Cray Fortran, HPF, etc... ("How do I call a subroutine with a Cray Pointer" - pointers were variant specific? Ugh). Pulling the variants together under a common standard made it reasonable to build projects from multiple g…

> It's a mess when you have many flavors of a language. Anyone else here remember the joy of various Fortran variants?

For those too young to remember Fortran: Markdown is just as bad. HN supports an extremely limited subset, Reddit another, Stackoverflow, Github and Gitlab each have their own flavors as well, and MediaWiki also has elements that IIRC came from Markdown. And that's just the biggest platforms and doesn't count the myriad of libraries and bindings with their unique subset/superset and edge cases.

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