Rust is winning market from C and C++ precisely because of strong technical leadership and direction. It couldn’t have made much progress by taking similar hands off approach as C, because C is already more than good enough C.

Wouldn’t you consider the C standards committee as the leadership of C?

110%. Any organization that lacks transparency in decision-making and accountability (that is, attribution of decisions to specific people) devolves into a shadow-hierarchy.

Which is even worse than an explicit hierarchy, because it provides more gray area for people with power to do things anonymously.

I don’t get the relation between structure and emotions.

Not sure there's a real connection between the languages at least when it comes to "drama". Especially considering JavaScript is the most used language, or at least in the top 5 at this rate due to how low the entry barrier is for serious use. So purely from numbers, there's bound to be a bunch with a background in JavaScript, as with any other new language. You could have also said the same thing about Python for the same reasons.

IMO the root actually comes from the very heavy social signals that were utilized by the Rust team early on (you can read a lot about them through the core team's reddit posts atp, especially under threads about the code of conduct). This effectively became a beacon for many people to gravitate towards. So when you see these sort of very dramatic disagreements that's laughable to anyone outside of that bubble, it's because that's the type of people Rust was (unintentionally or intentionally) beaconing.

Drama is common in human Comunnities.

this whole "woke" mentality is going out of hand too fast...

I mean, someone bullying some veterans/old men because they're "woke and feminist" isn't going to earn any sympathy from me.

nowadays... "woke" just means "I'm better than you (so I can/will do things that are otherwise unacceptable to you)"

...I think we chose the wrong word. Rather than "woke", it should have been "NO BULLYING" -- which includes all things the real "woke" people tried to do, and forbids all things the wrong "woke" people are trying to do

Yes. Nothing against it in theory, but it leads to stuff they don't like. Did you read the whole comment?

They said "in theory", which is a contrast to "in practice".

well its a difficult terminology to use because the right/conservative people are of course also against sjw/woke ideology. The distinction is that I'm criticizing very specific tendencies of some people whom could be best described as woke, not the underlying ideology. Such as when they weaponize privilege, language, race or sexuality in order to achieve some secondary unrelated or overarching goal. It's "the ends justify all means" mentality, if by democratic process you won't achieve consensus that agrees with your personal particular set of beliefs, then the rejection, destruction and undermining of collective decision making processes is justified. Which ignores the original reasons for why democratic structures exist in the first place (such as term limits and adversarial structures vs. corruption and abuse of power). This is essentially my criticism of some woke people.

It is very difficult to use the terminology even though it is the most accurate, because conservatives are the most loud adversaries of it, but they are just hateful racists, bigots, ableists, sexists, transphobes, homophobes, islamophobes, xenophobes, etc. Which of course invalidates everything they ever say.

It's also a relatively apt description of a small subset of left-wing groups. My assumption is that the parent comment is explicitly referring to this small subset.

Similarly "white supremacist" is often used as an insult on the inverse side, even for groups that don't believe in or desire white dominance. If someone actually does believe in those things, though, it's still a totally fine term to describe them.

Not really, you see the same term used in left wing circles to refer to liberals/synthetic left types.

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

What I don't get here is the following. No matter how egalitarian you organize such a conference, doesn't it make sense that the organizers get the last say in what the keynote looks like? They have an rough overview over all contributions and they can decide if what you contribute is best suited to be a keynote.

Of course that gives them a certain level of power of the discourse, but what is the alternative? Community-voted conference structures that fail to take many variables into account that you need to take into account for an enjoyable conference?

If I were invited as a keynote speaker and the conference organizers tell me that the stuff I produced is good, but not suitable for the keynote I wouldn't blame them, but myself. The only instance I could imagine was if they invited me specifically for a spicy topic and my talk was too spicy for them. But a tech talk? Come on.

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

Consensus attained by a shouting match?

The previous generations didn’t exactly set a good example for healthy, impersonal and professional argument.

curious - what tools were deprived to a whole generation?

Skins are luxuriously thin these days, yeah.

Previous recent generations also had most nations sending large groups of their men off to kill other nations' men for insufficient reasons.

As a result of the current geopolitics, we don't have the self-awareness to realize that minor conflicts are minor conflicts and that the absolute best place to be and thing to be doing is spending time at home with your loved ones.

We certainly shouldn't be carrying out PR strategy wars against our colleagues like is happening here...

How? Everything is done openly on https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs

I mean, I hear you. I understand what you're saying, I just don't understand how you (or others) think this is related to the technical aspects of the language.

As Rust the technology becomes increasingly important commercially, Rust the community will become more professional one way or another. Large companies want calm and predictable management of their core infrastructure. They have multiple levers, some overt, some less so, for getting it. Rust's leadership will either adopt professional standards of business conduct (as Linus did) or it will be replaced (like W3C was). There's too much riding on Rust now to leave its future up to emotion and chance.

This. I have avoided rust so far because I don't like the community around it and the reputation it's building. This type of drama really does effect the ecosystem.

It means that, like everything that started at Mozilla, Rust will have some uncomfortable growth phase and then mature at some group that may or may not be the original one.

We can expect some mildly bad decisions on the language evolution. But it's very unlikely that this will open a niche for another language to replace Rust.

> I think being apathetic about it won't solve anything either.

How so? Me, a random Rust dev, can't ever make any difference in how is the foundation governed.

But, if you are telling us that the Rust leadership will e.g. actively follow this very HN thread and base their policy on it then yeah, then I'd agree with you.

Or maybe Rust is great because Graydon was (presumably still is) an exceptionally skilled language designer and implementor. An increased focus on individuals makes sense to me because advances in technology give individuals more power, and it makes sense to me to minimize the overhead of coordination by making the most of that power to accomplish greater things with fewer people.

I appreciated the comment, because I feel the same way.

Part of empathy is realizing when someone is authentically upset, and telling that apart from when they are being cynically melodramatic.

> I left because when I felt JeanHeyd's pain and disappointment at being mistreated and betrayed, my heart broke. I wept because of the cruelty. But I also wept because I helped create the system that could do this to someone.

This shit does not come off as authentic even a little bit.

Which appears to be one of the underlying cultural flaws in the community to begin with. "Everyone sucks here" is a common situation because bad behavior is often a product of bad project culture.

If your workplace is regularly bringing you to tears, you should start looking for a new position. No one needs a job with that level of emotional overhead.

Are you really comparing this little spat to marital infidelity?

This further emphasizes OP's point—nothing the Rust team can do to you should approach the emotional impact of marital betrayal.

He is saying “be an actual professional and don’t bring a vocabulary pertaining to intimate discussions to the public sphere when what’s discussed is a technical conference.”

It’s already barely acceptable in a purely American context. To me as a European, this is extremely off putting and culturally out of line which is a recurring problem with Rust.

I think he is saying that words such as "cruelty" and "betrayal" have a weight in them that are way out of proportion to the events that took place.

I am a bit out of the loop (I don't know who the people involved are), but I tend to agree, I think. Sounds like a mix of miscommunication and group politics. Those are things that people might get upset, but the exaggerated response sounds like a cheap appeal to raw emotions.

I believe there is a wide range of possible emotional reactions between weeping about something on one end and sucking it up on the other.

Yes, that or "man up."

> if we can all figure out how to adult

Part of adulting is responding proportionally to childish behavior in others. Events like this feel like my toddlers fighting—he takes her pencil so she tears his paper so he hits her so she comes crying to mommy.

The adult in the room deescalates, they don't write an emotional blog about how betrayed they feel on behalf of someone else.

I still don't want to do them the favor of normalizing such dramatic language by accepting it. Just call it "unprofessional" if you truly feel that it was.

Here’s chatgpt:

—-

My decision to leave was driven by witnessing the negative impact on JeanHeyd resulting from the actions taken by Rust. The situation raised concerns about the treatment and the breach of trust that occurred. It made me reflect on the role I played in the development of the system and whether I want to continue to be associated with it.

—-

No weeping, no histrionic claims of betrayal.

If you're leaving the community anyway, does it matter if you violate the CoC through being honest about your opinions?

Not sure how much the empathy levels of someone -- not an objective metric -- should be used when making professional calls about speakers in a foundation but you do you.

The underlying problem seems to be: sidestepping democratic processes. IMO that is what should be addressed first and foremost.

Criticizing how the author (who just left Rust) engages with the community while he himself criticizes how engagement with the community is done is rather valuable.

Be the change you want to see in the world.

It's bizarre that you're scolding this person for being intolerant while implying such language is to be expected of "anyone autistic or on the spectrum". To me, that is offensive stereotyping.

Everyone here knows exactly who I am talking about. That isn't who the leadership is (as you well know).