Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why I Left Rust

jntrnr.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

531–540 of 880 posts

Re: Why I Left Rust

#531

Post by aigoochamna »

I can try to summarize my understanding of events.

  1. Dude gets invited to do a keynote. 
  2. Dude gets his keynote invite withdrawn because some members of the rust team were "uncomfortable" with the content of dude's blog. The content which was technical and not of the standard Twitter/cancellation variety. 
  3. Second Dude leaves rust leadership because he seen how the rust community treated first dude.
Totally understandable. Why waste more time with a community that can't discuss things critically even if they go against many ideas of the tech in question? Maybe a bit of an over reaction, but it's likely he knew a lot more of the community and what it's really like. This was likely the last straw.

Alternatively, look at the Go community and leadership. The Go team discussed generics and eventually implemented them although leadership and the community was often against it. They certainly didn't cancel keynotes or speakers that were pro-generics.

Re: Why I Left Rust

#532

Post by riskable »

quotemstr wrote: post #396
GuB-42 wrote: post #389

Earlier 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…

Other replies have made excellent points but I'd also like to point out that in the world of Rust the only time you want your code to panic is when something irrecoverable (at a very low level) happens. Like if you're messing around with bare metal/embedded stuff and you just set a (hardware) register but for whatever reason that call failed so now you can be guaranteed that the rest of your code just can't work. It's panic time!

If a crate is using panic because it encountered bad input or whatever then the crate isn't doing things in a rusty sort of way. Even if it's a wrapper around an unsafe C library that uses panic everywhere the language has tools to work around that which is not the same thing as having made an inherent, unfixable mistake in the design of the language (by having more than one way to deal with errors).

Re: Why I Left Rust

#533

Post by Larrikin »

lyu07282 wrote: post #149
indy wrote: post #88

Earlier 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…

[flagged]

Re: Why I Left Rust

#534

Post by foldr »

lamp987 wrote: post #248
bitwize wrote: post #9

Earlier 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…

>Fully 25% of Gen Z identify as LGBTQ. What does typing on a computer keyboard have to do with where you put your genitals? No one cares and most importantly, no one should care. Keep your sexual and romantic life to yourself in a programming community. >There are going to be struggles and clashes as members of different classes assert their grievances and call each other out. Thats a bad thing that must be nipped in…

>Keep your sexual and romantic life to yourself in a programming community.

It's normal for people to mention their romantic partners in casual conversation. Straight people do this all the time. So it's really really hard to interpret this request as anything other than a request for LGBTQ people specifically to hide the fact that they're LGBTQ from their coworkers.

Examples of straight people doing this:

> I have to leave early today to pick up my kids from school.

> I'm taking pat/maternity leave because we're having a baby.

> Can I bring my husband/wife to the team social?

Re: Why I Left Rust

#535

Post by bckr »

aranke wrote: post #118
jxf wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We can also turn that around: the organisers are essentially being called a bunch of cruel racist assholes here, all without any real evidence. You're getting evidence directly from someone who is a senior member of the Rust community and who participated directly in the original decision. Imagine you hear a series of bangs, walk into your living room, and see Alice holding a smoking gun and standing over Bob's bul…

Can we avoid using a gun analogy here? Nobody involved has died.

It’s just an expansion of the “smoking gun” idiom.

Re: Why I Left Rust

#536

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

rtpg wrote: post #280
paddw wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This whole exchange feels off. Essentially, the underlying spat is over a strong technical disagreement, but it is being prosecuted in this weirdly stylized language of emotion and abuse. I have no idea how something like this can be overcome so long as the core Rust community feels this is an acceptable way to handle things. Clearly this is something which extends beyond the immediate leadership team.

The problem is that the strong technical disagreement was not brought up the many times it could have! Instead the stick was stuck in the bike wheels way after the bike was moving forward at a decent speed. Though “downgrading keynote to talk” is obviously not the same as an outright disinvite, the fact that the original invitee asked explicitly about this content being pre-RFC (giving rust leadership the out to reso…

> that the strong technical disagreement was not brought up the many times it could have!

Consensus attained by a shouting match?

Re: Why I Left Rust

#537

Post by DiggyJohnson »

calibas wrote: post #516
lyu07282 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. I'm not sure what SJW or "woke" means in this context. They cancelled a black man because they felt "discomfort" over him being the keynote speaker.

But the fact that he was black is a non-factor here, and shouldn't even be mentioned.

Re: Why I Left Rust

#538

Post by preordained »

ninepoints wrote: post #444
bybybyby wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Considering Elon an "effective leader" is certainly a take.

The media hates him, and I can understand how that can be hard to separate out from one's view of reality; but, I think whether Elon has success despite actually being terrible as some might think, or is actually really good at what he does, he's been very successful on the whole if you can be the slightest bit objective. So, given that, you would have to claim to know, really know, that it's all despite him to say he's ineffective, which is a pretty silly thing to propose unqualified.

Re: Why I Left Rust

#539

Post by ssokolow »

jjtheblunt wrote: post #405
bob1029 wrote: post #352

All of this drama / culture war or whatever you want to call it is a big part of what turned me off to Rust in the first place. I come from .NET background and am open to the idea of a realistic C/C++ replacement. My experience with .NET and its "community" has left me with a really comfortable feeling with regard to my ability to do business, just "get shit done", etc. To be clear, there isn't really a community. I…

What's a LARP?

Live Action Role Play.

Basically taking the transformation that made sports into sports computer games and running it in reverse on computer RPGs so you get people in costume in the park throwing colored balls at each other to "cast spells".

Not really my thing, but a great way to get more fresh air and exercise if you're into RPGs.

Re: Why I Left Rust

#540

Post by dj_mc_merlin »

chrsig wrote: post #526
dj_mc_merlin wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The main issue is that the latter term is homogenizing: By that logic, white would be homgenizing as well, or? Someone from Prague has little in common with a person from Massachusetts or St. Petersburg.

I'd look towards stratified sampling to think more formally around the issue. POC is homogonizing because it's reducing the space from N strata to 2: white and non-white, blending n-1 strata. Per wikipedia: > Stratification is the process of dividing members of the population into homogeneous subgroups before sampling. The strata should define a partition of the population. That is, it should be collectively exhausti…

I fail to see how non white doesn't also reduce the strata to 2, however. Where is the third stratum?
Post reply on HN