Why I Left Rust

Didn't he save Twitter from total bankruptcy? That's effective imo. Still SpaceX and Tesla are examples of effectiveness overall.

He may not have been effective in all his ventures but for the majority he has been effective.

I'd say going into space and creating an effective electric car product is more than optics.

I disagree that “nothing can be done”.

There’s lots that could be done that don’t fall in to your description of affirmative action.

Invitations could be extended to people to submit proposals for a talk. This already happens, but maybe the circle gets expanded once it’s evident that the circle has been too small. The simple act of asking is often enough to make people feel welcome.

I also call BS on the claim that you’ve never discriminated against someone. No person is a saint like that. Every human and sentient creature has inherent biases.

Maybe you’ve never actively discriminated, but you most surely have passively done so at some time in your life. For anyone to claim they are perfect in this regard is only fooling one’s self.

That you then go on to say that it’s not there 95% of the time withoit any actual reflection on the matter perhaps shows that you’re not well versed enough in the dynamics of race and gender relations to make that call.

> When someone mentions a 'lack of Black representation', they're not saying that non-Black members are less valuable because of their skin color. Rather, they're highlighting that there appears to be a systemic issue preventing people of that particular race from participating or advancing in that space.

"Appears to be systemic racism" might be half a step too far. I would say, "The possibility exists. We should look carefully and see if there is, and if so, what we can do to fix it." But we should not assume systemic racism every time there are racially unequal outcomes.

Asians get into top colleges out of proportion to their numbers. Should we say there "appears to be a systemic issue" in favor of Asians? Or should we, perhaps, not take disparate outcomes as prima facie evidence of systemic racism?

I'm not saying that we should sweep it under the rug: "Nothing to see here." By all means, when there are disparate outcomes, look carefully. It's just that the wording went a bit too far, in the absence of further evidence.

I agree with you though about the cries about reverse racism. Not helpful to the discussion.

But I also believe that when someone cries out bias or discrimination by some group because of underrepresentation or lack of diversity, they are implying that affirmative action is the way to solve it. Maybe I'm putting words into people's mouths there, but it's just anecdotal

Definitely not. C was born in a different context, and these days it's not common for any language to have multiple competing implementations, certainly not in its early years. C needed the standard because there were many implementations, JavaScript needed a standard because there were many implementations, but Python or C# or Rust or Java don't have a standard (although there are technical specifications of different degrees of rigor) because the standard is what the reference toolset does, modulo what are accepted as bugs by the technical team.

There was no "leadership team" for Rust at Mozilla as far as I know. It was originally a one-person side project like C++ or Python, then it was elevated to an official Mozilla internal project as its potential in the context Gecko was understood by the higher-ups. But again, as far as I know, whatever culture formed around the project did so organically, but also as a conscious attempt to avoid many cultural issues seen in other OS projects. And mark my words, the Rust community as a whole is genuinely friendly and welcoming compared to almost any other internet community of similar extent, and there's nothing sinister underlying that friendliness as far as I can see.

When Mozilla got rid of Rust, the leading technical contributors continued as they had always done (albeit now with considerably fewer full-time paid contributors), as an independent self-organizing entity, but now even less accountable – in regard to technical decisions – for any external stakeholders but the Rust community itself. But some organization was required to foster Rust's growth, to manage all the inconvenient legal things, the interaction with the now several large stakeholders and funders such as Google and Amazon, and so on. So the Rust Foundation was created to manage all that. But the foundation's jurisdiction ends where the technical aspect of Rust begins – all the technical teams are still exactly what they used to be, accountable only to the greater community.

At any point, anyone could have experimented with different implementations with no "committee" saying what to do, but let's face it: first, modern compilers, even simple ones, are extraordinarily complex compared to an early C compiler running on a PDP-11, and second, in light of the first, Rust didn't grow in popularity nearly fast enough for anyone else bothering to write an implementation to experiment on.