> somebody from inside the Rust Project, but not with the consensus of all leadership, tried to downgrade my talk
> as evidenced by much of the public statements from existing, ex, and now-ex Rust Project members, the decision to unilaterally downgrade was not known to many of them until they read my post.
> Downgrading the keynote was NEVER voted on like inviting me to do the keynote in the first place.
If this is true, some mystical creature behind the scenes is pulling the strings somehow, and keeping in mind the whole Rust Foundation vs. Rust Project debacles of the past, and the fact that JT (who was the person proposing a new leadership model RFC for Rust...)... then I am kind of left with the question of when, not if, we will see a major community fork of Rust
What a mess. I wish people could just focus on the tech and drop their egos and all the drama.
> Dillon started DragonFly in the belief that the techniques adopted for threading and symmetric multiprocessing in FreeBSD 5 would lead to poor performance and maintenance problems. He sought to correct these anticipated problems within the FreeBSD project. Due to conflicts with other FreeBSD developers over the implementation of his ideas, his ability to directly change the codebase was eventually revoked.
Projects have forked over leadership issues plenty of times before; there have been cases where both parts of the fork stuck around (NetBSD/FreeBSD), and at least a couple where the projects' former leadership effectively gave up and handed the reins to the fork (egcs, a gcc fork which became the official gcc in 1999, after the FSF belatedly realized that their official version was getting stagnant, and X.org, which displaced XFree86 without a rename after users of the latter all abandoned it).
Bit of a nitpick, but I think you meant NetBSD/OpenBSD? AFAIK both FreeBSD and NetBSD independently continued the abandoned 386BSD project, but there was never any strong relation between the two projects (they did share code later on). OpenBSD did split from NetBSD, after Theo de Raadt was removed.
Other examples: FreeBSD/DragonFlyBSD, Vim/NeoVim, Mplayer/mpv, (Open)Solaris/illumos, MySQL/MariaDB, probably some more.
From what I was able to read and understand, there was a concern that the keynote placement could be seen as approving of a particular technical direction. This concern itself isn't super crazy to me; this is why you will see many other event program committees avoid placing technical talks advocating for a particular project direction in keynote slots.
Obviously the way that an individual (apparently) chose to go about addressing this concern was procedurally crappy, and overall a much better way here would have been to work with the talk author to make sure the talk or the event would frame things right after the keynote had already been decided, and given that there was no vote to change that decision.
But that doesn't mean the work is killed, or that the entire leadership group is bad, or that the organization can't learn from this now very public mistake and adopt better policies.
I think the problem is obviously that there is a sub-group that is making decisions that were supposed to be made in committee. If there is some sub-group operating this way for this instance then what does it mean at large for the language? Is the democratic process a complete sham etc
It's still a good language and the most attractive one for many purposes. Most people don't choose Java or C++ because they are thrilled by the stewardship of Oracle or JTC1/SC22/WG21, but because it's the right tool for the job.
Not saying Rust has outgrown its need for a community, but a lot of people would pick Rust over C++ even if they were guaranteed never to get another language update for it.
Yes, please split. One group keeping it as done language that it is. Hopefully all others, trying to transform it a type of new C++ style No feature left behind hyper-complex language - can take that train.
I think we have a camp of professional developers, who need to understand, work on, and refactor Rust based code daily...And a camp of academia programming language researchers, who would love to keep adding their favorite features to Rust. We already have a Rube Goldberg machine, it's C++
The people who seek out these positions are almost always doing it for their egos. If I had to guess based on my life experience the ones jumping ship are in the other camp.
Their long term concern is that their work on rustc will be undermined by the same people who pulled these shenanigans. Which is a pretty bad situation, and might result in a fork.
Forks do often end up having the effect of removing the person(s) who were roadblocking progress in the first place...as the compromise solution to the fork of the project.
I don't know if you've tried to record a talk to benefit people who have just thrown you under a bus, but I've tried and failed. I too would love to see that talk but I wouldn't expect that of JeanHeyd in this moment.
Fred was invited to do a keynote speech. Joe was one of those who campaigned for him to be invited.
Keynote speech was downgraded to normal speech at a late date, allegedly overriding a democratic decision.
Fred flounces off dramatically in response to the downgrading and posts a long rambling blog about it and tweets.
Joe resigns in support announcing it in a response to the tweet.
Joe then posts his reasons with a long rambling blog alleging political shenanigans behind the downgrading.
More discussion ongoing on various media.
Names may have been changed here.
Basically though, alleged politics and possible ego issues on either or both sides - with probably poor comms in the best case - centred here on a conference speaker.
Bear in mind that this is also in the context of Rust which has a history of these sorts of shenanigans.
>Keynote speech was downgraded to normal speech at a late date, allegedly overriding a democratic decision. Fred flounces off dramatically in response to the downgrading
Yeah, because "overriding a democratic decision" behind the scenes to backstab someone is a small thing in a project...
JeanHeyd Meneide was invited to give a keynote at RustConf. He was not planning on giving a talk at all (can't recall whether he was planning on going to the conference in the first place), and he says he was plenty clear about what he would be talking about, that it's super experimental and somewhat controversial (from a technical standpoint), and and that he didn't want him giving a keynote about it to seem like tacit endorsement of his ideas. The RustConf organisers assured him it would be fine.
Fast forward and the conf organisers advise him that his keynote has been "demoted" to a regular talk. He says this is unprofessional and a lack of respect, cancels his talks, and posts about it. One of the people in the core team (I think?) quit in protest because of how this all happened behind the scenes. This particular post is JeanHeyd's comments on JT's explaining why he quit.
>Fast forward and the conf organisers advise him that his keynote has been "demoted" to a regular talk. He says this is unprofessional and a lack of respect, cancels his talks, and posts about it.
You missed the part where this demoting happened behind the scenes, was not voted for by the team, the suggestion to downvote didn't even reach the team, because some shady person did it on their own, and it was communicated to JeanHeyd himself at the last minute (so that he could check with the team and bring it to their awareness either).
So, kind of missing the whole point, and painting a bad picture of JeanHeyd to boot...
I might've been a bit overzealous in keeping my own opinion out of it. I didn't meant to paint a bad picture of JeanHeyd. In fact, I specifically tried to highlight how he tried to avoid drama.
Ultimately, I don't even think the shady behind the scenes stuff is the part we should focus on.They invited him to give the keynote, he advised them that it might be a problem, they specifically told him it was fine, and then dropped the keynote for precisely the reasons he said it might be a problem. That is extremely disrespectful and unprofessional by any reasonable standard.
I think the behind the scenes stuff is what makes this relevant at all. How is an organization bound by some particular set of decision making rules able to get totally circumvented in this case?
If you're committed to this work, but cannot get it into Rust, look to TypeScript as an example. Build a Rust-like language that compiles to Rust in a predictable way and add your features there.
Why does anyone actually care about this? So much drama about a guys talk getting downgraded? The language being used in this whole controversy suggests something actually meaningful happened, when in reality it's just completely banal.
This is a volunteer-driven open source community that operates in the relative open, and occasionally you will see how the sausage is made, or some dirty laundry. It's getting attention because that community is producing something popular with a lot of stakeholders, who are not active in the organization but worried about its health and stability.
It's also not completely banal. Designing durable non-profits, governance structures, decision-making processes, policies, etc. is quite complex. You can to some extend evaluate your success by how much public drama you get to avoid. :-) That makes it a case study of interest.
(I've helped run one of the major FOSS orgs for about a decade or so.)
It bears keeping in mind that plenty of other organizations have the same drama, but more hidden from public view. Rust is in the awkward spot of being primarily community driven unlike Go or Java, and also having that community operate mostly in public channels unlike C++. That is ultimately for the best, but it exposes a lot more "mess" to the public.
C++ language evolution is developed mostly in public. We don't get to see WG21 meetings, but we see most of the emails (https://lists.isocpp.org/std-proposals/), almost all of the TS proposal papers (everything except for very early drafts), and notable meetings still have multiple recaps from various participants in addition the the Meeting Minutes publicly outlining what these discussions are about, and we see (afaik) all of the formal votes that the committee members take (although the votes are anonymized). Plus a considerable amount of the conversation happens on GitHub, and many paper authors ask for feedback on Reddit and chat clients.
Also, the standards work is only a portion of C++ language evolution. Clang RFCs are public and anyone can provide feedback, the GCC mailing list is public, and both of their issue trackers (which include feature requests) are public.
We're not talking about mishandling sponsorship funds or unilateral decisions made on technical architecture, we're talking about time slots at a technical conference.
There's nothing here but some beef between PhD and a yet-unknown member of rust leadership. This is high school stuff, the wider community should not elevate this or read these tea leaves.
That's a mischaracterization. The issue is that the yet-unknown member of rust leadership violated the norms, and neither of the two teams involved were able to do anything about it. The problem is not the beef but the way it was handled by the system as a whole.
That rust leadership person is a dickhead. Great. End of story. Sometimes in life people are dicks, they eat your sandwich from the employee fridge even though it was clearly labeled as yours. That makes that individual a jerk, not the wider organization an Evil Empire.
A: Obviously enough people to make this a rather lively HN discussion. And to make it somewhat prominent news in the tech sphere in general. So, quite a lot of people.
Which makes one wonder why exactly you are repeatedly trying to minimise it with this dismissive “who cares”? One can't help but wonder if it is because you have some personal stake here that you don't want people scrutinizing too thoroughly.
It's not "some beef between ThePhD and a yet-unknown member of Rust leadership", that makes it sound like it goes both way. It's a yet-unknown member of Rust leadership who apparently has a problem with ThePhD, but doesn't want to explain what that problem is, doesn't even want to make their identity known to ThePhD, and silently circumvents the normal decision-making process of the Rust Project to block ThePhD's work from making progress.
Maybe PhD flipped them off in an intersection, who cares!
It doesn't matter, it's completely irrelevant to the wider technical community. We'll never know and we shouldn't want to. This shouldn't have escalated past some emails about "what gives", but because some of the people involved have two speed grievance meters (none and crisis) we get to watch this soap opera play out.
Rust leadership person is probably a dickhead, great, lots of people are dickheads. I hope their friends say mean things about them when they leave the table at group lunches.
Way to miss the point. The point isn't the keynote / non-keynote itself, it's how it went from one to the other, and what that says about the state of the Rust project.
> Rust leadership person is probably a dickhead, great, lots of people are dickheads.
The point is, Rust isn't supposed to have a “leadership person”; it's supposed to be run by a group of people. The fact that some (as you so correctly conclude) dickhead is able to circumvent that, and in effect usurp de facto leadership (at least on this issue), shows that Rust’s leadership process isn't working as it is supposed to.
It's hard to conceive of how extremely narrow a view one must take on this “soap opera”, in order not to see that what it shows is actually a pretty big deal. Squinting really hard, aren't ya?
It might be overblown but still - the guy was invited first-hand to have a keynote and then told that's not happening a short while later. Whatever the reasoning was, the whole thing was very poorly handled. It should have been either throughly discussed before the invite - flip-flopping is the worst-case scenario.
Because of this, one of the major proposals for a better compile-time reflection system in Rust is not going to get developed any further.
A languages thrives when enough talented people are developing it further. We are seeing some of that talent going away because of these kinds of drama.
All the breathless language about how terrible this supposedly is really turns me off. It seems like every person involved in this debacle is being ridiculously childish
The fact that the effect was minor (a talk getting downgraded) is not an excuse for the magnitude of the procedural problem. If a publicly voted decision by the Rust leadership committee can be undone by a single member, than that seriously calls into question that the committee has any real power.
Only if you focus on the ephemera and refuse to see the actual issue: The keynote becoming un-keynoted is just the tip of the iceberg. The real problem, that this tip only serves to reveal, is in how it became un-keynoted.
Rust is supposed to be run by a committee or group of some sort, apparently called “Rust Leadership” something. This ostensible Leadership had approved the keynote as such. Then some individual(s?) went behind the committee's back and un-keynoted it. That they did this – that they were even able to do it – shows that they're the actual leaders of the Rust project, not the committee that is claimed to be.
Not being able to see that that's a pretty big deal is... Weird, to say the least. Feels like one would have to work pretty hard at not wanting to see it.
Fascinating, but ultimately could be healthy for the org. Everyone makes mistakes. What's not okay is to make a mistake and not admit it or correct it. Whoever among the Rust leadership misrepresented themselves to RustConf as representing consensus will hopefully admit their mistake and make amends. That would be healthy and good for the org. Anything that makes that harder, like demonizing or expelling those responsible, should be resisted. This is how organizations should work.
The best way to describe this melodrama really is just another explosion in an ant hill in the desert.
This is really just another day of the self-canabalization of Rust and its Foundation and the language so-called 'community' continues to have more ridiculous tantrums and melodrama over the tiniest of all things.
Yet another first world issue of pointless pantomimes which can only be found in Rust.
these kinds of "social issues" that arise from communities like these are always a huge turn-off for me, and I know I'm not the only one. I don't know enough about this situation or the broader context in which it took place but everything about this post, including some of the original blog post author's own comments, and some of the comments here, reinforces my desire to have nothing to do with "the Rust community", or any other programming "community" like it.
one gets the feeling that people participate in these "communities" for purely social posturing reasons, wholly unrelated to making things with computers, while still retaining the veneer of "being part of and participating in a programming language community", and that just doesn't sit right with me.
one also gets the feeling that, when some fresh drama like this happens, each of these blog posts and responses and whatnot is not-so-secretly a form of opportunistic self-aggrandizing grift.
when one of these "communities" attracts a critical mass of social-posturing drama like this, it's just too easy for an outsider like myself to say, "nah, I'm good, thanks"—and if the goal of the "community" is to make the best programming language possible, surely this must similarly dissuade others who would otherwise be down to spend countless hours actually working on the thing and making it good.
there's good lessons to be learned here all around for anyone aspiring to create a productive "community" around something like a new programming language—take heed!
The thing is for some.of the academics involved the social in-and-out are their whole careers. If you're a PhD who's entire work is about rust then this stuff matters a lot.
I think that's why having more corporate involvement is probably good for these kind of orgs. Corporate types value stability because the code needs to work and be maintained long term.
Corporate contributions also suffer from the same perverse incentives. If you want that promo, better make sure it's your code and proposal that made it into the standard.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 132 ms ] thread> as evidenced by much of the public statements from existing, ex, and now-ex Rust Project members, the decision to unilaterally downgrade was not known to many of them until they read my post.
> Downgrading the keynote was NEVER voted on like inviting me to do the keynote in the first place.
If this is true, some mystical creature behind the scenes is pulling the strings somehow, and keeping in mind the whole Rust Foundation vs. Rust Project debacles of the past, and the fact that JT (who was the person proposing a new leadership model RFC for Rust...)... then I am kind of left with the question of when, not if, we will see a major community fork of Rust
What a mess. I wish people could just focus on the tech and drop their egos and all the drama.
It's already happened. https://crablang.org/
At first I thought it was a joke, but now I'm not so sure
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27309412/what-is-the-dif...
There are loads of forks that happen due to disagreements in organisation.
> Dillon started DragonFly in the belief that the techniques adopted for threading and symmetric multiprocessing in FreeBSD 5 would lead to poor performance and maintenance problems. He sought to correct these anticipated problems within the FreeBSD project. Due to conflicts with other FreeBSD developers over the implementation of his ideas, his ability to directly change the codebase was eventually revoked.
Do SQL dialects in Databases count? mariadb
Bit of a nitpick, but I think you meant NetBSD/OpenBSD? AFAIK both FreeBSD and NetBSD independently continued the abandoned 386BSD project, but there was never any strong relation between the two projects (they did share code later on). OpenBSD did split from NetBSD, after Theo de Raadt was removed.
Other examples: FreeBSD/DragonFlyBSD, Vim/NeoVim, Mplayer/mpv, (Open)Solaris/illumos, MySQL/MariaDB, probably some more.
From what I was able to read and understand, there was a concern that the keynote placement could be seen as approving of a particular technical direction. This concern itself isn't super crazy to me; this is why you will see many other event program committees avoid placing technical talks advocating for a particular project direction in keynote slots.
Obviously the way that an individual (apparently) chose to go about addressing this concern was procedurally crappy, and overall a much better way here would have been to work with the talk author to make sure the talk or the event would frame things right after the keynote had already been decided, and given that there was no vote to change that decision.
But that doesn't mean the work is killed, or that the entire leadership group is bad, or that the organization can't learn from this now very public mistake and adopt better policies.
This whole discussion has been full of emotional over-reaction
Not saying Rust has outgrown its need for a community, but a lot of people would pick Rust over C++ even if they were guaranteed never to get another language update for it.
IMO record a keynote and put it out on the day of the conference.
And the threat of a fork is politics again
Keynote speech was downgraded to normal speech at a late date, allegedly overriding a democratic decision.
Fred flounces off dramatically in response to the downgrading and posts a long rambling blog about it and tweets.
Joe resigns in support announcing it in a response to the tweet.
Joe then posts his reasons with a long rambling blog alleging political shenanigans behind the downgrading.
More discussion ongoing on various media.
Names may have been changed here.
Basically though, alleged politics and possible ego issues on either or both sides - with probably poor comms in the best case - centred here on a conference speaker.
Bear in mind that this is also in the context of Rust which has a history of these sorts of shenanigans.
But yeah, perhaps I shouldn't have been so glib in making a private reflection public; apologies if anybody involved is reading the thread.
Yeah, because "overriding a democratic decision" behind the scenes to backstab someone is a small thing in a project...
(Nor was it Fred)
Fast forward and the conf organisers advise him that his keynote has been "demoted" to a regular talk. He says this is unprofessional and a lack of respect, cancels his talks, and posts about it. One of the people in the core team (I think?) quit in protest because of how this all happened behind the scenes. This particular post is JeanHeyd's comments on JT's explaining why he quit.
You missed the part where this demoting happened behind the scenes, was not voted for by the team, the suggestion to downvote didn't even reach the team, because some shady person did it on their own, and it was communicated to JeanHeyd himself at the last minute (so that he could check with the team and bring it to their awareness either).
So, kind of missing the whole point, and painting a bad picture of JeanHeyd to boot...
Ultimately, I don't even think the shady behind the scenes stuff is the part we should focus on.They invited him to give the keynote, he advised them that it might be a problem, they specifically told him it was fine, and then dropped the keynote for precisely the reasons he said it might be a problem. That is extremely disrespectful and unprofessional by any reasonable standard.
Who?
It's also not completely banal. Designing durable non-profits, governance structures, decision-making processes, policies, etc. is quite complex. You can to some extend evaluate your success by how much public drama you get to avoid. :-) That makes it a case study of interest.
(I've helped run one of the major FOSS orgs for about a decade or so.)
Also, the standards work is only a portion of C++ language evolution. Clang RFCs are public and anyone can provide feedback, the GCC mailing list is public, and both of their issue trackers (which include feature requests) are public.
There's nothing here but some beef between PhD and a yet-unknown member of rust leadership. This is high school stuff, the wider community should not elevate this or read these tea leaves.
Who cares
That rust leadership person is a dickhead. Great. End of story. Sometimes in life people are dicks, they eat your sandwich from the employee fridge even though it was clearly labeled as yours. That makes that individual a jerk, not the wider organization an Evil Empire.
> Who cares
A: Obviously enough people to make this a rather lively HN discussion. And to make it somewhat prominent news in the tech sphere in general. So, quite a lot of people.
Which makes one wonder why exactly you are repeatedly trying to minimise it with this dismissive “who cares”? One can't help but wonder if it is because you have some personal stake here that you don't want people scrutinizing too thoroughly.
That... is a problem.
It doesn't matter, it's completely irrelevant to the wider technical community. We'll never know and we shouldn't want to. This shouldn't have escalated past some emails about "what gives", but because some of the people involved have two speed grievance meters (none and crisis) we get to watch this soap opera play out.
Rust leadership person is probably a dickhead, great, lots of people are dickheads. I hope their friends say mean things about them when they leave the table at group lunches.
> Rust leadership person is probably a dickhead, great, lots of people are dickheads.
The point is, Rust isn't supposed to have a “leadership person”; it's supposed to be run by a group of people. The fact that some (as you so correctly conclude) dickhead is able to circumvent that, and in effect usurp de facto leadership (at least on this issue), shows that Rust’s leadership process isn't working as it is supposed to.
It's hard to conceive of how extremely narrow a view one must take on this “soap opera”, in order not to see that what it shows is actually a pretty big deal. Squinting really hard, aren't ya?
A languages thrives when enough talented people are developing it further. We are seeing some of that talent going away because of these kinds of drama.
Everyone has seen enough committees that run projects in a dictatorial style while hiding behind a CoC.
We don't know what is the case here, but it is useful information for anyone who thought about contributing.
People care less about drama that inside info.
Because it sets the tone of discussion and contribution, the amount of respect contributors get, and the kind of behind the scene games played.
>So much drama about a guys talk getting downgraded?
Yes, because it sets the tone of discussion and contribution, the amount of respect contributors get, and the kind of behind the scene games played.
Perhaps it needs to happen to some personally before they can see it as the insult and unfair back-stabbing that it is.
Rust is supposed to be run by a committee or group of some sort, apparently called “Rust Leadership” something. This ostensible Leadership had approved the keynote as such. Then some individual(s?) went behind the committee's back and un-keynoted it. That they did this – that they were even able to do it – shows that they're the actual leaders of the Rust project, not the committee that is claimed to be.
Not being able to see that that's a pretty big deal is... Weird, to say the least. Feels like one would have to work pretty hard at not wanting to see it.
FWIW it sounds genuine to me.
This is really just another day of the self-canabalization of Rust and its Foundation and the language so-called 'community' continues to have more ridiculous tantrums and melodrama over the tiniest of all things.
Yet another first world issue of pointless pantomimes which can only be found in Rust.
one gets the feeling that people participate in these "communities" for purely social posturing reasons, wholly unrelated to making things with computers, while still retaining the veneer of "being part of and participating in a programming language community", and that just doesn't sit right with me.
one also gets the feeling that, when some fresh drama like this happens, each of these blog posts and responses and whatnot is not-so-secretly a form of opportunistic self-aggrandizing grift.
when one of these "communities" attracts a critical mass of social-posturing drama like this, it's just too easy for an outsider like myself to say, "nah, I'm good, thanks"—and if the goal of the "community" is to make the best programming language possible, surely this must similarly dissuade others who would otherwise be down to spend countless hours actually working on the thing and making it good.
there's good lessons to be learned here all around for anyone aspiring to create a productive "community" around something like a new programming language—take heed!
I think that's why having more corporate involvement is probably good for these kind of orgs. Corporate types value stability because the code needs to work and be maintained long term.
A ton of the people raising issues are being way too vague about it. Throw. Them. Under. The. God. Damn. Bus. Already.
I assure you it is simple to do and it will come to a head sooner, instead of dragging out the teen drama in perpetuity.