As an active Rust user in both my professional and hobby work, this ongoing fracas is very frustrating: everything thus far has been extremely oblique, to the detriment of my confidence in anybody in the community's ability to just speak their damn mind about what's really going on.
Some of the allegations in this post are worrisome (like the handling of travel costs, and the papering over of legitimate concerns around Palantir). But (and maybe this is just my shortsightedness) nothing explicitly stated rises to the level of "toxicity." I wish the community would be given more information so that we could fairly evaluate and justify the use of that word.
I don't get the problem with Palantir. You can't prevent an organization from using a language in their project can you? The issue as stated seems to be that some people both worked for Palantir and were involved with Rust? Why single-out Palantir? Should anyone remotely related to any defense or surveillance be ostracized? Where does that stops? Who gets to say who is pure enough to be accepted?
I;m sure some will read this as me supporting Palantir, because that's how the Internet works, but I don't and find them unpalatable.
The same goes for travel costs. It seems a delicate issue: do you fund people who are deeply involved in the project and have shown a continued effort, or new members who might drop next week? To the author, the answer seems so obvious, to me it isn't.
When I saw the word "toxic" I was expecting standard issue misogyny, racist comments, or other standard "CHUD" behavior.
What I see here is evidence of a team that simply isn't experienced with running a serious organization and/or has personal issues around communication skills and personal organizational skills. That's not "toxic" but it is a serious scaling issue. In companies this usually necessitates bringing in someone in a senior executive role who is good at these things and empowering them to take over some of those functions.
Toxic to me implies actual covert or overt hostility.
My own experience with this group has been remarkably similar. Oversized ego, dismissive of others, overtly aggressive to competing ideas and technologies, the Rust core team is simply one of the worst I've ever had to make contacts with.
The overall feeling when dealing with them is that they are so sure that they represent the "future of programming" that they want the rest of the world to burn now, and no one else than themselves to benefit from the aftermaths.
(I used to be active on Rust in the 2014-2018 era, but then moved away, essentially disgusted by the attitude).
I think calling a team that is (it sounds like) struggling with governance and organizing a conference "toxic" doesn't feel right.
I think it is good to also show some empathy here and consider that probably nobody gets paid to be on the core team or to run the Rust project. It can't be easy to be in the middle of such a vibrant and vocal community, basically as a second job. At least that is what I think when I read some of the situations in this post.
The article and its author represent the toxicity that the Rust community would be better without. The article is a series of illegitimate attacks against valued members of the community. Author and article condemned.
The article is a long series of wild speculation about motives of the core team, each complaint falsifiable by basic critical reasoning skills where one considers other plausible reasons for observed behavior. Furthermore, attacking valued contributors who happen to work at Palantir is wrong. These people are among the best engineers in the world who have generously shared their work through open source, creating foundational works that everyone benefits by. They're great human beings, too. We need more of them.
Condemn me all you like, but considering the fact this is my firsthand account and that I've worked directly with these people for the past few years, and others who have worked them have said that their experience with these people was similar. And considering that you have not worked with these people or in the rust-lang organisation, which of us is really wildly speculating here? :)
I wanted Rust to replace C++, but now I feel that it’s fallen right back into design by committee complexity in the language and ecosystem tooling and is just if not more complicated to use than C++, and it also seems to have a lot of community toxicity. Knowing that the people driving it’s future are constantly getting bad press makes me want to avoid getting involved.
While I do think memory safety is important, Rust is not a panacea with no trade offs. Community and vision are definitely part of
The equation. If I had to pick a systems programming language I might still pick C for its simplicity, staying power, and lack of drama.
One's choice of implementation language for a project should not be taken as a statement of faith in anything but your ability to use that language to solve a problem. A language that has opinions about ones ethics as a defining feature seems intended to solve a different problem than any i have.
This is wrong on two readings: the core team is a governance team, not an engineering team, and the people who have raised concerns thus far have been prominent contributors to the Rust ecosystem.
Are there any sociological studies into the breakdown of FOSS development over time? Over the years I have seen most of them result in schisms and forks when given any widespread popularity.
I'm not familiar with one, but I don't also necessarily buy the hypothesis. Proportional to its exponential growth, I don't necessarily see a larger-than-expected increase in social strife.
I don't know anything about these two sides or what are their issues, but I can see this article has zero actual facts. Sounds like some low level buerocrat who is salty at not being appreciated by his boss.
I am not sure I understand why most of the points mentioned are of such concern.
Are contributions only accepted from folks who fit into some morality bucket ? Why does one care about an "evil" contributor as long as code-contribution is good ?
Will the Rust Foundation also be a Nanny and change the Rust license and say NO to rust-use in missiles, ads, surveillance, etc ?
Is it so bad to cover the travel expenses of the Core team to a cheaper location ?
I am also confused. How can the "Core Team" be given the toxic label with someone like Steve Klabnik on it ?
"The gall to publicly declare that Black Lives Matter as part of the release, while privately continuing to collaborate with the companies that provide the software that spies and suppresses those same lives and activists, is an unacceptable hypocrisy that undermines the actual work of members in the organisation to provide a space for those people."
This reminds me of a debate that was going on in the late 1940s and early 1950s in the Soviet Union about the class character of language. Replace "class" with "race/gender/sexual orientation/etc", and "language" with "programming language" to get how it applies to the debate here:
"The first mistake is that they confuse language with superstructure. They think that since the superstructure has a class character, language too must be a class language, and not a language common to the whole people. But I have already said that language and superstructure are two different concepts, and that a Marxist must not confuse them.
The second mistake of these comrades is that they conceive the opposition of interests of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the fierce class struggle between them, as meaning the disintegration of society, as a break of all ties between the hostile classes. They believe that, since society has disintegrated and there is no longer a single society, but only classes, a single language of society, a national language, is unnecessary. If society has disintegrated and there is no longer a language common to the whole people, a national language, what remains? There remain classes and 'class languages.' Naturally, every 'class language' will have its 'class' grammar -- a 'proletarian' grammar or a 'bourgeois' grammar. True, such grammars do not exist anywhere. But that does not worry these comrades: they believe that such grammars will appear in due course.
At one time there were 'Marxists' in our country who asserted that the railways left to us after the October Revolution were bourgeois railways, that it would be unseemly for us Marxists to use them, that they should be torn up and new, 'proletarian' railways built. For this they were nicknamed 'troglodytes'.
It goes without saying that such a primitive-anarchist view of society, of classes, of language has nothing in common with Marxism. But it undoubtedly exists and continues to prevail in the minds of certain of our muddled comrades"
The reason Stalin himself had to jump into the debate was because technological progress was starting to be hampered by the hyperpoliticization of everything in society including language and technology. After the purges, everyone became overly fanatical in their desire to identify "class enemies" in all fields. Beria had a lot of problems on the nuclear bomb project because of this hyperpoliticization. Stalin saw this was hurting technological development so he had to jump into the debate and tell everyone explicitly to stop politicizing technology.
Thus, even if you are as far left politically as anyone could possibly be, even Stalin would tell you that you are making an error in politicizing technology.
[+] [-] woodruffw|4 years ago|reply
Some of the allegations in this post are worrisome (like the handling of travel costs, and the papering over of legitimate concerns around Palantir). But (and maybe this is just my shortsightedness) nothing explicitly stated rises to the level of "toxicity." I wish the community would be given more information so that we could fairly evaluate and justify the use of that word.
[+] [-] pierrebai|4 years ago|reply
I;m sure some will read this as me supporting Palantir, because that's how the Internet works, but I don't and find them unpalatable.
The same goes for travel costs. It seems a delicate issue: do you fund people who are deeply involved in the project and have shown a continued effort, or new members who might drop next week? To the author, the answer seems so obvious, to me it isn't.
[+] [-] api|4 years ago|reply
What I see here is evidence of a team that simply isn't experienced with running a serious organization and/or has personal issues around communication skills and personal organizational skills. That's not "toxic" but it is a serious scaling issue. In companies this usually necessitates bringing in someone in a senior executive role who is good at these things and empowering them to take over some of those functions.
Toxic to me implies actual covert or overt hostility.
[+] [-] titaniczero|4 years ago|reply
Context (in order):
1.) https://archive.fo/f10KK 2.) https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/announcement-ashley-willia... 3.) https://github.com/rustwasm/wasm-pack/issues/914 and https://github.com/rustwasm/wasm-pack/issues/928 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28515306 4.) https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/qzme1z/moderation_tea... and https://github.com/rust-lang/team/pull/671
[+] [-] telendram|4 years ago|reply
My own experience with this group has been remarkably similar. Oversized ego, dismissive of others, overtly aggressive to competing ideas and technologies, the Rust core team is simply one of the worst I've ever had to make contacts with. The overall feeling when dealing with them is that they are so sure that they represent the "future of programming" that they want the rest of the world to burn now, and no one else than themselves to benefit from the aftermaths.
(I used to be active on Rust in the 2014-2018 era, but then moved away, essentially disgusted by the attitude).
[+] [-] st3fan|4 years ago|reply
I think it is good to also show some empathy here and consider that probably nobody gets paid to be on the core team or to run the Rust project. It can't be easy to be in the middle of such a vibrant and vocal community, basically as a second job. At least that is what I think when I read some of the situations in this post.
[+] [-] tablespoon|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dowwie|4 years ago|reply
The article is a long series of wild speculation about motives of the core team, each complaint falsifiable by basic critical reasoning skills where one considers other plausible reasons for observed behavior. Furthermore, attacking valued contributors who happen to work at Palantir is wrong. These people are among the best engineers in the world who have generously shared their work through open source, creating foundational works that everyone benefits by. They're great human beings, too. We need more of them.
[+] [-] XAMPPRocky|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ilovecaching|4 years ago|reply
While I do think memory safety is important, Rust is not a panacea with no trade offs. Community and vision are definitely part of The equation. If I had to pick a systems programming language I might still pick C for its simplicity, staying power, and lack of drama.
[+] [-] h2odragon|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kazinator|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] woodruffw|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bishop_mandible|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] volta83|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] f38zf5vdt|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] woodruffw|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] detaro|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] panta82|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bishop_mandible|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lenkite|4 years ago|reply
Are contributions only accepted from folks who fit into some morality bucket ? Why does one care about an "evil" contributor as long as code-contribution is good ?
Will the Rust Foundation also be a Nanny and change the Rust license and say NO to rust-use in missiles, ads, surveillance, etc ?
Is it so bad to cover the travel expenses of the Core team to a cheaper location ?
I am also confused. How can the "Core Team" be given the toxic label with someone like Steve Klabnik on it ?
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] narrator|4 years ago|reply
The reason Stalin himself had to jump into the debate was because technological progress was starting to be hampered by the hyperpoliticization of everything in society including language and technology. After the purges, everyone became overly fanatical in their desire to identify "class enemies" in all fields. Beria had a lot of problems on the nuclear bomb project because of this hyperpoliticization. Stalin saw this was hurting technological development so he had to jump into the debate and tell everyone explicitly to stop politicizing technology.
Thus, even if you are as far left politically as anyone could possibly be, even Stalin would tell you that you are making an error in politicizing technology.
[+] [-] jayar95|4 years ago|reply
Thank you, I loved this haha.
[+] [-] jalino23|4 years ago|reply
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