I have resigned from all roles in rustlang, effective immediately

But to be clear, in this case they werent asked to give a specific talk. The speaker came up with it.

My understanding of the situation is this:

At the request of Rust Project, JeanHeyd is asked to give a keynote at RustConf. JeanHeyd is reluctant, worried that their topic is too speculative and too much like a proposal for implementing a Rust feature. They ask around and get told it’s definitely ok, please don’t decline the talk, etc. Later, after the talk is prepared, RustConf contacts JeanHeyd to say their talk has been downgraded from keynote, at the request of Rust Project. The reason given is that Rust Project does not want to endorse their direction on this feature. It is not a very good reason, as JeanHeyd had already taken many steps to make it clear in the talk that this is speculative, was not offered a chance to make changes to the talk that make it even more clear that Rust Project doesn’t endorse it, was only giving a talk on this topic because Rust Project requested it in the first place, and there have been other keynotes that also run afoul of this reason but were not bumped in this manner. JeanHeyd writes a blog post explaining this, retracting their talk entirely, and posing the question: what is the real reason for the bump? Later, JT resigns from all roles in rustlang, citing JeanHeyd’s blog post but not otherwise elaborating.

Obviously, all the interesting stuff is happening below the surface here. I’ll hazard a few guesses (and that’s all they are, just guesses; I don’t know the situation and I don’t know the people in it, nor am I speaking for them):

1. “Losing an internal political battle”. JT may have been involved in having Rust Project push JeanHeyd for the talk. Others in Rust Project were against the talk, and had Rust Project reverse course on it. JT resigns in protest.

2. “Discovering and being dismayed by internal politics”. People outside the Rust Project were echoing JeanHeyd’s question, what is the real reason here? JT is well-connected and respected in the Rust community and may have tried to find out the real reason. Perhaps JT finds the real reason and is disgusted (or perhaps JT gets similarly stonewalled, and is disgusted by that), and resigns.

3. (More speculative, based on both JeanHeyd and JT being open about their neurodivergence, drawing on my own as well) “Autists trying to avoid internal politics”. Many aspects of how Rust Project handled this situation would be uncomfortable for autistic individuals (opaque decision-making process, abrupt reversal, inadequate justification, not up for debate - to name a few). JT may therefore find it inhospitable, and so resigns.

All true Scotsmen are always online.

My working hypothesis: it attracts puzzle solvers, people who have a passion for – and sometimes an obsession with – perfect systems. When applied to life outside of the confines of the type system, it can lead to a black and white thinking that ironically explains the behavior of both parties: the organizers unwilling to admit to their medium sized mistake and the speaker rage quitting in response. It’s all or nothing. It either compiles and is correct or it’s incomprehensible nonsense.

All organizations and their people make mistakes. Most people intrinsically expect that the world is somewhat fuzzy, including most engineering types. Responsibilities and conduct isn’t formalized, it loosely follows a set of cultural expectations. The good side effect of this fuzziness is that mistakes happen so often that you start expecting them. And then you don’t have to get upset or part ways when something bad happened. How you as an individual or organization recover from these mistakes is a lot more important than trying to stop them from happening.

People who think mistakes are unacceptable are often the same types who are the most unwilling to recognize their own mistakes.

>What is it about Rust that attracts so much drama like this?

Well, one has to ask whether Rust actually has "more" drama than average, or if it just tends to be more public. I lean towards the latter. I mean, people have gotten into shouting matches that nearly escalated to fistfights at CPP conferences, but that all happens behind closed doors.