34 ms·

Increasing Rust’s Reach

190 points by darwhy 9y ago

Normal_gaussian 9y ago
> But there’s a bit of a bootstrapping problem here: if we want to reach new people, we can’t do it by relying solely on the skills and perspectives of our existing community. Cool, so they are looking to make Rust more useful by involving people with different perspectives. > we would especially love insights from include women (cis & trans), nonbinary folks, people of color Oh. Well this is weird. They seem like awfully indirect measurements of relevant skills and perspective Edit: explained in a comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14657507 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14657507 by wll > non-native English speakers, people who learned programming later in life (older, or only in college, or at a bootcamp as part of a midlife career change), people with disabilities, or people who have different learning styles. Ah yes. This is what I expected to see. I'm loving what Rust is currently bringing and is going to bring to the world, I want them to be really approachable, and I want it to be used in new ways - but it really reads like they are playing with going the way of Github. EDIT: See earlier edit.
- kmicklas 9y ago
  > but it really reads like they are playing with going the way of Github. What's the way of GitHub?
  - d33 9y ago
    For example this? http://www.businessinsider.com/diversity-guru-discusses-white-women-2016-2?IR=T http://www.businessinsider.com/diversity-guru-discusses-whit... This topic is likely to become a flamewar IMHO though.
    - kmicklas 9y ago
      Was not aware of this. It seems like the downvote war already begun just for me asking this question...
      - humanrebar 9y ago
        Downvoting in the name of diverse perspectives is... not something to aspire to.
        kmicklas 9y ago
        Well I downvote racists and sexists on HN all the time. But I think people with good intentions should be free to discuss.
- syndev 9y ago
  > Oh. Well this is weird. They seem like awfully indirect measurements of relevant skills and perspective Documentation or discussion could use language that means some demographic groups aren't comfortable getting involved, when they could otherwise be great contributors. It's a reasonable idea that some people already think computer programming "isn't for them", and that correcting that misconception is important. I agree that people should be judged by their merits, so we should focus on not deterring people for non-technical reasons.
- wll 9y ago
  > Oh. Well this is weird. They seem like awfully indirect measurements of relevant skills and perspective The effort to reach underrepresented demographics seems to stem from last year's survey results [0]. Increased diversity could lead to new project-wide perspectives and overall community enrichment, if solely due to life-experience-based heterogeneity. [0] https://blog.rust-lang.org/2016/06/30/State-of-Rust-Survey-2016.html#survey-demographics https://blog.rust-lang.org/2016/06/30/State-of-Rust-Survey-2...
  - DaiPlusPlus 9y ago
    I see it as a way of investigating possible unconscious bias or even hostility towards minorities in the Rust developer community - from easily fixable things such as male-bias in documentation (e.g. examples using male pronouns disproportionately) - to vitriolic sexist and other abuse in chat and forum groups. Fortunately the Rust community isn't GamerGate, but if we can eliminate those attitudes sooner, then that's in Rust's long-term interests.
    - collyw 9y ago
      Considering the vast majority of programmers are male, does it really matter if we use male pronouns. What does changing them actually solve? Are women really put off of computing because of that? It all seems so trivial.
      - emilk 9y ago
        Many small trivial things can add up. Also, if we cater to the status quo ("the vast majority of programmers"), the status quo is less likely to change.
        teacup50 9y ago
        Why is the status quo a problem? I'm not saying it isn't; I don't know. I just don't see why should we assume that it is.
- blevin 9y ago
  > They seem like awfully indirect measurements of relevant skills and perspective Well, maybe that's the thing: they aren't measurements of relevant skills or perspective. Instead, you might consider it a form of stratified sampling: trying to include sub-populations that may not be as well-represented so far but may supply valuable contributions.
- Certhas 9y ago
  >> we would especially love insights from include women (cis & trans), nonbinary folks, people of color > Oh. Well this is weird. They seem like awfully indirect measurements of relevant skills and perspective It might be indirect, but if the empirical evidence says they are under represented, then there is a reason for that. Asking for their perspectives is a sensible way to investigate what the reason may be. Let's be clear, I don't think it's necessarily within the Rust communities power to change these reasons. If mothers tell their daughters that programming is for boys [1], and discourage them from spending all their time at the computer, then that would be expected, somewhere far down the road, to lead to an under representation of women. That's hard to fix, and it's not something the Rust community can do much about, given that none of the mothers involved would have ever heard of Rust to begin with. But maybe there will also be some ways to be more welcoming, and I'd expect that to overlap somewhat with the latter points (that you approved off) that have a more clear cut causal hypothesis associated to them. If you were discouraged from playing around with programming as a kid, you'll likely have ended up learning programming later in life. If you were socialized to avoid conflict, then a high conflict environment will be a turn off. Asking what makes it better for people with a different background has the potential to make it better for people who might not share the background, but the handicaps it confers. [1] http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~abaron/downloads/Croft_Schmader_Block_Baron_PsySci2014.pdf http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~abaron/downloads/Croft_Schmader_Bl...
  - teacup50 9y ago
    > Asking for their perspectives is a sensible way to investigate what the reason may be. Is it? Why? When patients visit the ER, they often believe that whatever change in their diet that they're aware of and focused on -- like eating cabbage last week -- must be the cause of their ailment. When parents had their children diagnosed with autism, they cast their net for the nearest change to be blamed ... and found vaccines.
    - tpush 9y ago
      Ahem, what? Are you really saying underrepresented people don't know why they don't contribute to a project they maybe would have?
- teacup50 9y ago
  At first I thought "Great! They're looking for intellectual diversity of thought! Breaking out of their thought monoculture!" Then I saw that they were only interested in identity groups, not intellectual diversity, and my identity, as defined by them, is apparently already well-represented ... even if my intellectual positions and experience are not. Pointless, lame, and wrong. [edit] Don't misinterpret "poorly represented" as implying that my experience is "special".
  - urethrafranklin 9y ago
    Okay, I'll bite: what's so special about your intellectual positions?
    - Danihan 9y ago
      What's so special about someone's gender identity?
  - nickpsecurity 9y ago
    I agree. There's two forms of diversity to try to increase: under-represented categories and intellectual. The latter is actually the most important as these people think differently. It's that which gives them both their extra potential for innovation and conflict within groups. A racial/gender mix that mostly think alike on key issues isn't diverse in this regard. That will change representation or wealth spread in the minority categories but not provide the benefits of diversity to an organization. The good news is people from different backgrounds and places are often already diverse a bit in their thinking. There's still some benefit. Strongest is looking for both, though. I've done that in my social circle offline and online. We mostly get along despite strong disagreement on some topics. We learn from each other. They can do stuff I can't. We've come up with some great ideas together. They're mostly white but really different. At work, the split varies considerably with most of them I talk to being black over past months. A few were among most unique or hardworking people I've seen in a while, too. So, worth considering both kinds of diversity when talking about the subject.
- empath75 9y ago
  Programming as a profession is not merely a technical exercise and there is a large social and cultural dimension to it, which should be taken into account, although I think that in the attempt to be inclusive from the perspective of the American cultural milieu, they're going to put off international contributors. That list of minorities seems totally valid to me from an American perspective, but doesn't necessarily make sense everywhere. And I think they should make an effort to reach out to people of lower economic/educational status or rural areas, regardless of race/gender/etc.
johnhattan 9y ago
Is Rust gaining any traction for system-level programming? When I heard that there was now a memory-safe thread-safe language without a GC, my immediate thought was "Every OS from now on should be written in this thing".
- kmicklas 9y ago
  That might already be the case. The problem is new (non-research) OSs aren't written that often...
- oconnor663 9y ago
  Yes lots of people had that thought :-D https://www.reddit.com/r/rustjerk/ https://www.reddit.com/r/rustjerk/
- joshmarlow 9y ago
  It's an open question if this will go anywhere, but one OS is being written in Rust from the ground-up - https://www.redox-os.org/ https://www.redox-os.org/ I'm pretty impressed by the progress the project has already made. If I had a bit more time I'd love to contribute!
- kosinus 9y ago
  Slow and steady, certainly this won't happen overnight. There is Redox, for the full-on ambitious plan to write an OS from scratch: https://www.redox-os.org https://www.redox-os.org Then there's the Rust rewrite of coreutils: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils https://github.com/uutils/coreutils Someone also did the research on building a Linux kernel module in Rust, though it seems like quite the hassle: https://github.com/tsgates/rust.ko https://github.com/tsgates/rust.ko
  - joshmarlow 9y ago
    Do you know of any discussion of rewriting parts of existing micro-kernels in Rust? There's lots of nuts and bolts details I don't know, but it seems like having OS components as separate services/processes would provide a nice way to start phasing out C/C++ and phasing in Rust.
currymj 9y ago
I am really stoked to see Tango on here. I maintain that literate programming is actually a good idea. The nice thing about Tango is you can work either on the code file or the markdown file and it will automatically synchronize them, and it integrates with cargo. I would love to see Tango be mature and widely used.
- methodin 9y ago
  Just got into rust a couple weeks ago - thanks for pointing out Tango. Had no idea what it was until it finally clicked. Pretty awesome!
bushin 9y ago
Huh, I thought the Rust team includes front-enders and how Rust websites look is a purely stylistic choice.
tyingq 9y ago
Improving the experience on Windows might increase reach as well. Reading this thread, there appear to be some issues: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13974238 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13974238 Specifically, openssl dependencies, more win32 bindings, and better official docs on how to get it working.
- steveklabnik 9y ago
  This is very much on our radar; I use Windows as my primary OS now, even.
nickpsecurity 9y ago
"We have a team of Rust community leaders to pair you with. This group isn’t particularly diverse; this is where the Rust community is right now. " That's where it's been since the beginning. All the politics, Coraline's Code of Conduct, moderation, talk of "inclusiveness," and so on with "social justice" advocates in or leading some teams. You'd think the teams themselves would be diverse as heck with the community following. Yet, those in control from the beginning up to now are mostly young, white males on almost every team in the pictures. https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/team.html https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/team.html Reminds me a bit of the Huffington Post pic on Twitter showing a bunch of mostly white women running a company whose writers talk lots about how companies should be inclusive and/or diverse without actually practicing it. https://www.reddit.com/r/facepalm/comments/4kn6ms/huffington_post_tweet_fail/ https://www.reddit.com/r/facepalm/comments/4kn6ms/huffington... Both showed structural racism, sexism, and age discrimination exist at the management (esp hiring) level. No surprise that the resulting community wasn't diverse enough in practice when those leading it weren't. One tends to follow the other. There's a bootstrapping requirement of sorts where having internal diversity helps ensure it in the areas they act on (eg communities). It's not there... probably intentionally as some other organizations actively sought out different kinds of people in hiring with either quotas or blind auditions. I could see specific positions in language or compiler teams getting white males or something narrow due to prevalence among top teams in CompSci. However, many jobs on this list don't take a genius so much as someone willing to learn and work. More typical kind of work that both majority and minority talent exists and can handle. Like in the tweeted reply to Huffington, I suggest the Rust team can begin improving diversity by looking to see if there's a handful of black people in their geographical area or working remotely if allowed that are capable of writing code, writing docs, talking to people online about the language, doing CI, moderating away mean posts, and other things I see in team descriptions. I swear I've seen and met such people doing such jobs in the past in person and online. If they're in Mountain View with Mozilla, Wikipedia tells me that area is over 50% non-white with lots of Latinos and Asians. A lot of women live out there, too. If I'm wrong about the structural discrimination, then none of them can code, write, admin, or assist people and/or they're not in the pipeline somehow with hiring having no way to look for them. Outside the small amount on the Rust team already that are minority members. Call me skeptical that the talent for average work didn't exist or was too hard to find.
SagelyGuru 9y ago
I am really not interested in your current US obsession with identity politics. I care for a well designed, well performing language, which Rust appears to be. I could not care less about what is the colour of people writing it, their sexual orientations, or how well represented they all are. It may seem relevant to you but it certainly is not to me. I don't even know what cis women are or are supposed to be. Are they good designers and programmers?
- gambogi 9y ago
  Good designers and programmers do care about people of all ages, colors, orientations, genders, and ability. If tech is to make the biggest positive impact possible everyone must be on board.
  - SagelyGuru 9y ago
    I did not say that I do not care about people. I said I do not care about what type of people have written the language. Do you see the difference? When I use Rust, I don't even know what was the colour and sexual orientation of every person that has written every part of it. Why do you think I should know that and care about that? What makes you think it is relevant?
    - humanrebar 9y ago
      Agreed. If we care about diverse perspectives, we can't imply that there's only one way to care about people.
    - wehere1 9y ago
      this comment is so tone deaf... just because you don't care doesn't mean that the non-inclusive communities surrounding Rust / programming in general is a significant barrier to entry for many people
      - humanrebar 9y ago
        That's a pretty harsh way to respond to someone expressing another diverse perspective. Different cultures have different concepts of propriety and politeness. One person's "tone deaf" is another's "respectfully forward". We can't ask for diversity while demanding people adopt our particular cultural norms.
bsder 9y ago
Embedded ... embedded ... embedded. Getting Rust to the point where it is better than C on embedded systems is both feasible (C on embedded sucks on a good day) and would pay off hugely.
- steveklabnik 9y ago
  This is a very active area of work.
  - bsder 9y ago
    I have been tracking it quite strongly. My big problem currently isn't using it; my big problem is that others can't read it. So, a work problem to use it needs to be 1) resource constrained and 2) limited programming scope so only I have to deal with it. 1) is easy. 2), not so much.
DominoTree 9y ago
I am really not interested in your current rant. I care for a well-thought post, which I hope you are capable of. I could not care less about what you think is or is not relevant to you. I don't even know what identity politics is supposed to be.
- SagelyGuru 9y ago
  Well, at least "identity politics" are two proper English words, not just some weird abbreviation like "cis".
  - steveklabnik 9y ago
    "cis" is not an abbreviation, it's an adjective/prefix. It comes from Latin, incidentally.
    - dragonwriter 9y ago
      In the use ”cis-woman" it is an abbreviation for "cisgender". (In "cisgender", it's a prefix which is the opposite of "trans-".) It's, therefore, both a prefix and an abbreviation (it's an adjective in that it's an abbreviation for an adjective.)
      - steveklabnik 9y ago
        Yes, my slash was intended to be an 'and'. Good clarification, thanks.
  - humanrebar 9y ago
    See, you get identified with new nouns and adjectives so that other people can better self identify. It's about letting people define themselves. Just not you per se.
- dang 9y ago
  This thread is breaking out in flames everywhere but here you made it even worse. Please don't post like this to HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14658514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14658514 and marked it off-topic.
fhoffa 9y ago
Data wise: According to the latest Stack Overflow survey, Rust is the language that women are the least interested in. Any thoughts on why? Row WantWorkLanguage responses perc_female 1 R 2477 11.87% 2 Ruby 3743 11.03% 3 Java 9409 8.42% 4 Python 11878 8.22% 5 SQL 10646 7.81% 6 Scala 2972 7.64% 7 JS 15451 7.37% 8 Swift 4282 7.36% 9 PHP 5039 7.22% 10 C# 9640 6.21% 11 C++ 7178 5.20% 12 Go 5500 4.87% 13 C 4536 4.83% 14 TypeScr 5435 4.51% 15 Haskell 2208 4.35% 16 Rust 2604 3.38% (related thread: https://twitter.com/felipehoffa/status/879806078866776064 https://twitter.com/felipehoffa/status/879806078866776064) SELECT WantWorkLanguage, COUNT(*) responses, FORMAT('%.2f%%', 100*COUNTIF(v='Female')/COUNT(*)) perc_female FROM ( SELECT SPLIT(WantWorkLanguage , '; ') WantWorkLanguage, Gender v FROM `fh-bigquery.stackoverflow.survey_results_public_2017` WHERE WantWorkLanguage!='NA' AND Gender!='NA' ), UNNEST(WantWorkLanguage) WantWorkLanguage GROUP BY 1 HAVING responses>2000 ORDER BY COUNTIF(v='Female')/COUNT(*) DESC
- seanwilson 9y ago
  I'd be interested to see more statistics but at a guess there's more female programmers in industries where Rust isn't relevant? Swift is probably only interesting if you're in an industry that would target iOS for example.
- nickpsecurity 9y ago
  Now this is a wild guess on feedback I've read from women. There's currently less of them coding for fun than men for cultural reasons but plenty are willing to learn a language to make money. Those in the top 10 are all over job ads. That by itself might skew women toward those languages.
  - fhoffa 9y ago
    Interesting guess! Let's see. What if I take all mentions of each language on HN's who's hiring threads, vs % of women interested in each language? There is correlation! Chart: - http://i.imgur.com/mcN6Ghz.png http://i.imgur.com/mcN6Ghz.png If we take out the 2 outliers (r, go) - the correlation is 0.61. SELECT * FROM ( SELECT word, COUNT(*) c FROM ( SELECT SPLIT(REGEXP_REPLACE(LOWER(text), r'[^a-z]', ' '), ' ') words FROM `bigquery-public-data.hacker_news.full` WHERE parent IN ( SELECT id FROM `bigquery-public-data.hacker_news.full` WHERE title LIKE 'Ask HN: Who is hiring?%2017%' ) ), UNNEST(words) word WHERE LENGTH(word)>1 OR (word='r') GROUP BY 1 HAVING c>30 ) a JOIN ( SELECT LOWER(WantWorkLanguage) language, COUNT(*) responses, ROUND(100*COUNTIF(v='Female')/COUNT(*), 2) perc_female FROM ( SELECT SPLIT(WantWorkLanguage , '; ') WantWorkLanguage, Gender v FROM `fh-bigquery.stackoverflow.survey_results_public_2017` WHERE WantWorkLanguage!='NA' AND Gender!='NA' ), UNNEST(WantWorkLanguage) WantWorkLanguage GROUP BY 1 HAVING responses>2000 ) b ON a.word=b.language (caveat: "go" is an overloaded word)
throwasehasdwi 9y ago
Are you implying that Rust should be the first programming language of these minority groups? Given the complexity of low level programming that doesn't sound like a good idea. If that is not your plan then this is a pointless exercise. The cohort of existing programmers is highly biased in these same ways. The bigger Rust gets the more difficult it will be to maintain anything far from the average. If rust becomes as popular as say Java or C++ it will be statistically impossible to maintain anything but the average within the community.
- steveklabnik 9y ago
  > Are you implying that Rust should be the first programming language of these minority groups? No.
  - throwasehasdwi 9y ago
    Did you read the rest? I appreciate a reply from the core team but you must understand your potential audience of Rust users is a highly gender/racial biased cohort. If Rust becomes popular it will become near impossible to deviate from the mean unless you engage in affirmative action by selectively removing community members in the majority. Edit: I'm not against these kinds of initiatives at all, I just don't think it's realistic to apply such goals to a free-form group of programming language users.
    - steveklabnik 9y ago
      > Did you read the rest? I did, but I disagree. You're making a large assumption, which is that the group will follow the demographic average. This is not true; individual programming languages' demographics differ from the overall population. And there's certainly no desire to "remove" anyone, selectively or not. It's about growing the pie, not placing artificial limits. Also, this initiative is not about people new to programming overall, it's about experienced people who may not know Rust or haven't found a way to get involved with Rust as a project.
Animats 9y ago
Focus on getting the printed books into bookstores and onto Amazon. Most are still stuck at "pre-order". Get someone who is not on the developer team or a fanboy to write a good Rust book. (Yes, there's "Rust Essentials", but from Amazon reviews, it's a thrown-together set of introductory material that just refers you back to the Rust web site.) Go had this problem in the early days. The early materials were totally uncritical, or in denial of, of Go's weaknesses. Things have improved; now the problems and limitations are better understood. Now people understand that shared data should be protected by ordinary mutexes, rather than using message passing of dummy messages as a locking system. Newer materials reflect this.
- steveklabnik 9y ago
  There are two that should hit print + Amazon this year, https://www.nostarch.com/Rust https://www.nostarch.com/Rust (mine) and http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920040385.do http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920040385.do
slang800 9y ago
> geekfeminism.org Yeah, that sounds like an unbiased source that will totally give you an accurate picture of how the average female feels about pronouns in documentation. /s
- jlebar 9y ago
  I am genuinely confused why you think a large portion -- if not a commanding majority -- of women in tech would not self-identify with "geek feminism". Naturally that website doesn't (can't) speak for all women in tech, but I never claimed that it did, and anyway that's an unreasonable standard to hold any website to. Let me make a more general point: Every time women and minorities come up on HN, I am so sad to see discussions like this. As much as we might not want to admit it, our community is toxic. This is why we need feminism, Black Lives Matter, and so on. This is why the Rust community needs to engage with women and other underrepresented groups. If you doubted that there is a problem, just read the comments here. I can only hope people will either learn how to be nice people, or decide to leave tech and be mean somewhere else. Being nice to people is actually kind of fun. You should try it.
  - slang800 9y ago
    > I am genuinely confused why you think a large portion -- if not a commanding majority -- of women in tech would not self-identify with "geek feminism" According to YouGov, 23% of women identify as feminist, 5% are anti-feminist, and the rest are neither. Your opinion is probably skewed due to overrepresentation of feminists in media. http://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/tabs_gender_0411122013.pdf http://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/tabs_gender_0411122013.... > I can only hope people will either learn how to be nice people, or decide to leave tech and be mean somewhere else Nice people don't try to force identity politics down everyone's throats. Your comments are the ones that are "toxic".
    - jlebar 9y ago
      Do you think 23% of women is not a "large portion"? Let's imagine that only 23% of women care about being called "she" instead of "he". Do you think it's "forcing identity politics down everyone's throats" for them to ask to be referred to by their preferred pronoun? Because that's what we were discussing here. The anger this has engendered in you and others here is truly stunning.

190 points by darwhy 9y ago

> But there’s a bit of a bootstrapping problem here: if we want to reach new people, we can’t do it by relying solely on the skills and perspectives of our existing community. Cool, so they are looking to make Rust more useful by involving people with different perspectives. > we would especially love insights from include women (cis & trans), nonbinary folks, people of color Oh. Well this is weird. They seem like awfully indirect measurements of relevant skills and perspective Edit: explained in a comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14657507 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14657507 by wll > non-native English speakers, people who learned programming later in life (older, or only in college, or at a bootcamp as part of a midlife career change), people with disabilities, or people who have different learning styles. Ah yes. This is what I expected to see. I'm loving what Rust is currently bringing and is going to bring to the world, I want them to be really approachable, and I want it to be used in new ways - but it really reads like they are playing with going the way of Github. EDIT: See earlier edit.

kmicklas 9y ago
> but it really reads like they are playing with going the way of Github. What's the way of GitHub?
- d33 9y ago
  For example this? http://www.businessinsider.com/diversity-guru-discusses-white-women-2016-2?IR=T http://www.businessinsider.com/diversity-guru-discusses-whit... This topic is likely to become a flamewar IMHO though.
  - kmicklas 9y ago
    Was not aware of this. It seems like the downvote war already begun just for me asking this question...
    - humanrebar 9y ago
      Downvoting in the name of diverse perspectives is... not something to aspire to.
      - kmicklas 9y ago
        Well I downvote racists and sexists on HN all the time. But I think people with good intentions should be free to discuss.
syndev 9y ago
> Oh. Well this is weird. They seem like awfully indirect measurements of relevant skills and perspective Documentation or discussion could use language that means some demographic groups aren't comfortable getting involved, when they could otherwise be great contributors. It's a reasonable idea that some people already think computer programming "isn't for them", and that correcting that misconception is important. I agree that people should be judged by their merits, so we should focus on not deterring people for non-technical reasons.
wll 9y ago
> Oh. Well this is weird. They seem like awfully indirect measurements of relevant skills and perspective The effort to reach underrepresented demographics seems to stem from last year's survey results [0]. Increased diversity could lead to new project-wide perspectives and overall community enrichment, if solely due to life-experience-based heterogeneity. [0] https://blog.rust-lang.org/2016/06/30/State-of-Rust-Survey-2016.html#survey-demographics https://blog.rust-lang.org/2016/06/30/State-of-Rust-Survey-2...
- DaiPlusPlus 9y ago
  I see it as a way of investigating possible unconscious bias or even hostility towards minorities in the Rust developer community - from easily fixable things such as male-bias in documentation (e.g. examples using male pronouns disproportionately) - to vitriolic sexist and other abuse in chat and forum groups. Fortunately the Rust community isn't GamerGate, but if we can eliminate those attitudes sooner, then that's in Rust's long-term interests.
  - collyw 9y ago
    Considering the vast majority of programmers are male, does it really matter if we use male pronouns. What does changing them actually solve? Are women really put off of computing because of that? It all seems so trivial.
    - emilk 9y ago
      Many small trivial things can add up. Also, if we cater to the status quo ("the vast majority of programmers"), the status quo is less likely to change.
      - teacup50 9y ago
        Why is the status quo a problem? I'm not saying it isn't; I don't know. I just don't see why should we assume that it is.
blevin 9y ago
> They seem like awfully indirect measurements of relevant skills and perspective Well, maybe that's the thing: they aren't measurements of relevant skills or perspective. Instead, you might consider it a form of stratified sampling: trying to include sub-populations that may not be as well-represented so far but may supply valuable contributions.
Certhas 9y ago
>> we would especially love insights from include women (cis & trans), nonbinary folks, people of color > Oh. Well this is weird. They seem like awfully indirect measurements of relevant skills and perspective It might be indirect, but if the empirical evidence says they are under represented, then there is a reason for that. Asking for their perspectives is a sensible way to investigate what the reason may be. Let's be clear, I don't think it's necessarily within the Rust communities power to change these reasons. If mothers tell their daughters that programming is for boys [1], and discourage them from spending all their time at the computer, then that would be expected, somewhere far down the road, to lead to an under representation of women. That's hard to fix, and it's not something the Rust community can do much about, given that none of the mothers involved would have ever heard of Rust to begin with. But maybe there will also be some ways to be more welcoming, and I'd expect that to overlap somewhat with the latter points (that you approved off) that have a more clear cut causal hypothesis associated to them. If you were discouraged from playing around with programming as a kid, you'll likely have ended up learning programming later in life. If you were socialized to avoid conflict, then a high conflict environment will be a turn off. Asking what makes it better for people with a different background has the potential to make it better for people who might not share the background, but the handicaps it confers. [1] http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~abaron/downloads/Croft_Schmader_Block_Baron_PsySci2014.pdf http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~abaron/downloads/Croft_Schmader_Bl...
- teacup50 9y ago
  > Asking for their perspectives is a sensible way to investigate what the reason may be. Is it? Why? When patients visit the ER, they often believe that whatever change in their diet that they're aware of and focused on -- like eating cabbage last week -- must be the cause of their ailment. When parents had their children diagnosed with autism, they cast their net for the nearest change to be blamed ... and found vaccines.
  - tpush 9y ago
    Ahem, what? Are you really saying underrepresented people don't know why they don't contribute to a project they maybe would have?
teacup50 9y ago
At first I thought "Great! They're looking for intellectual diversity of thought! Breaking out of their thought monoculture!" Then I saw that they were only interested in identity groups, not intellectual diversity, and my identity, as defined by them, is apparently already well-represented ... even if my intellectual positions and experience are not. Pointless, lame, and wrong. [edit] Don't misinterpret "poorly represented" as implying that my experience is "special".
- urethrafranklin 9y ago
  Okay, I'll bite: what's so special about your intellectual positions?
  - Danihan 9y ago
    What's so special about someone's gender identity?
- nickpsecurity 9y ago
  I agree. There's two forms of diversity to try to increase: under-represented categories and intellectual. The latter is actually the most important as these people think differently. It's that which gives them both their extra potential for innovation and conflict within groups. A racial/gender mix that mostly think alike on key issues isn't diverse in this regard. That will change representation or wealth spread in the minority categories but not provide the benefits of diversity to an organization. The good news is people from different backgrounds and places are often already diverse a bit in their thinking. There's still some benefit. Strongest is looking for both, though. I've done that in my social circle offline and online. We mostly get along despite strong disagreement on some topics. We learn from each other. They can do stuff I can't. We've come up with some great ideas together. They're mostly white but really different. At work, the split varies considerably with most of them I talk to being black over past months. A few were among most unique or hardworking people I've seen in a while, too. So, worth considering both kinds of diversity when talking about the subject.
empath75 9y ago
Programming as a profession is not merely a technical exercise and there is a large social and cultural dimension to it, which should be taken into account, although I think that in the attempt to be inclusive from the perspective of the American cultural milieu, they're going to put off international contributors. That list of minorities seems totally valid to me from an American perspective, but doesn't necessarily make sense everywhere. And I think they should make an effort to reach out to people of lower economic/educational status or rural areas, regardless of race/gender/etc.

johnhattan 9y ago

Is Rust gaining any traction for system-level programming? When I heard that there was now a memory-safe thread-safe language without a GC, my immediate thought was "Every OS from now on should be written in this thing".

kmicklas 9y ago
That might already be the case. The problem is new (non-research) OSs aren't written that often...
oconnor663 9y ago
Yes lots of people had that thought :-D https://www.reddit.com/r/rustjerk/ https://www.reddit.com/r/rustjerk/
joshmarlow 9y ago
It's an open question if this will go anywhere, but one OS is being written in Rust from the ground-up - https://www.redox-os.org/ https://www.redox-os.org/ I'm pretty impressed by the progress the project has already made. If I had a bit more time I'd love to contribute!
kosinus 9y ago
Slow and steady, certainly this won't happen overnight. There is Redox, for the full-on ambitious plan to write an OS from scratch: https://www.redox-os.org https://www.redox-os.org Then there's the Rust rewrite of coreutils: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils https://github.com/uutils/coreutils Someone also did the research on building a Linux kernel module in Rust, though it seems like quite the hassle: https://github.com/tsgates/rust.ko https://github.com/tsgates/rust.ko
- joshmarlow 9y ago
  Do you know of any discussion of rewriting parts of existing micro-kernels in Rust? There's lots of nuts and bolts details I don't know, but it seems like having OS components as separate services/processes would provide a nice way to start phasing out C/C++ and phasing in Rust.

currymj 9y ago

I am really stoked to see Tango on here. I maintain that literate programming is actually a good idea. The nice thing about Tango is you can work either on the code file or the markdown file and it will automatically synchronize them, and it integrates with cargo. I would love to see Tango be mature and widely used.

methodin 9y ago
Just got into rust a couple weeks ago - thanks for pointing out Tango. Had no idea what it was until it finally clicked. Pretty awesome!

bushin 9y ago

Huh, I thought the Rust team includes front-enders and how Rust websites look is a purely stylistic choice.

tyingq 9y ago

Improving the experience on Windows might increase reach as well. Reading this thread, there appear to be some issues: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13974238 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13974238 Specifically, openssl dependencies, more win32 bindings, and better official docs on how to get it working.

steveklabnik 9y ago
This is very much on our radar; I use Windows as my primary OS now, even.

nickpsecurity 9y ago

"We have a team of Rust community leaders to pair you with. This group isn’t particularly diverse; this is where the Rust community is right now. " That's where it's been since the beginning. All the politics, Coraline's Code of Conduct, moderation, talk of "inclusiveness," and so on with "social justice" advocates in or leading some teams. You'd think the teams themselves would be diverse as heck with the community following. Yet, those in control from the beginning up to now are mostly young, white males on almost every team in the pictures. https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/team.html https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/team.html Reminds me a bit of the Huffington Post pic on Twitter showing a bunch of mostly white women running a company whose writers talk lots about how companies should be inclusive and/or diverse without actually practicing it. https://www.reddit.com/r/facepalm/comments/4kn6ms/huffington_post_tweet_fail/ https://www.reddit.com/r/facepalm/comments/4kn6ms/huffington... Both showed structural racism, sexism, and age discrimination exist at the management (esp hiring) level. No surprise that the resulting community wasn't diverse enough in practice when those leading it weren't. One tends to follow the other. There's a bootstrapping requirement of sorts where having internal diversity helps ensure it in the areas they act on (eg communities). It's not there... probably intentionally as some other organizations actively sought out different kinds of people in hiring with either quotas or blind auditions. I could see specific positions in language or compiler teams getting white males or something narrow due to prevalence among top teams in CompSci. However, many jobs on this list don't take a genius so much as someone willing to learn and work. More typical kind of work that both majority and minority talent exists and can handle. Like in the tweeted reply to Huffington, I suggest the Rust team can begin improving diversity by looking to see if there's a handful of black people in their geographical area or working remotely if allowed that are capable of writing code, writing docs, talking to people online about the language, doing CI, moderating away mean posts, and other things I see in team descriptions. I swear I've seen and met such people doing such jobs in the past in person and online. If they're in Mountain View with Mozilla, Wikipedia tells me that area is over 50% non-white with lots of Latinos and Asians. A lot of women live out there, too. If I'm wrong about the structural discrimination, then none of them can code, write, admin, or assist people and/or they're not in the pipeline somehow with hiring having no way to look for them. Outside the small amount on the Rust team already that are minority members. Call me skeptical that the talent for average work didn't exist or was too hard to find.

SagelyGuru 9y ago

I am really not interested in your current US obsession with identity politics. I care for a well designed, well performing language, which Rust appears to be. I could not care less about what is the colour of people writing it, their sexual orientations, or how well represented they all are. It may seem relevant to you but it certainly is not to me. I don't even know what cis women are or are supposed to be. Are they good designers and programmers?

gambogi 9y ago
Good designers and programmers do care about people of all ages, colors, orientations, genders, and ability. If tech is to make the biggest positive impact possible everyone must be on board.
- SagelyGuru 9y ago
  I did not say that I do not care about people. I said I do not care about what type of people have written the language. Do you see the difference? When I use Rust, I don't even know what was the colour and sexual orientation of every person that has written every part of it. Why do you think I should know that and care about that? What makes you think it is relevant?
  - humanrebar 9y ago
    Agreed. If we care about diverse perspectives, we can't imply that there's only one way to care about people.
  - wehere1 9y ago
    this comment is so tone deaf... just because you don't care doesn't mean that the non-inclusive communities surrounding Rust / programming in general is a significant barrier to entry for many people
    - humanrebar 9y ago
      That's a pretty harsh way to respond to someone expressing another diverse perspective. Different cultures have different concepts of propriety and politeness. One person's "tone deaf" is another's "respectfully forward". We can't ask for diversity while demanding people adopt our particular cultural norms.

bsder 9y ago

Embedded ... embedded ... embedded. Getting Rust to the point where it is better than C on embedded systems is both feasible (C on embedded sucks on a good day) and would pay off hugely.

steveklabnik 9y ago
This is a very active area of work.
- bsder 9y ago
  I have been tracking it quite strongly. My big problem currently isn't using it; my big problem is that others can't read it. So, a work problem to use it needs to be 1) resource constrained and 2) limited programming scope so only I have to deal with it. 1) is easy. 2), not so much.

DominoTree 9y ago

I am really not interested in your current rant. I care for a well-thought post, which I hope you are capable of. I could not care less about what you think is or is not relevant to you. I don't even know what identity politics is supposed to be.

SagelyGuru 9y ago
Well, at least "identity politics" are two proper English words, not just some weird abbreviation like "cis".
- steveklabnik 9y ago
  "cis" is not an abbreviation, it's an adjective/prefix. It comes from Latin, incidentally.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    In the use ”cis-woman" it is an abbreviation for "cisgender". (In "cisgender", it's a prefix which is the opposite of "trans-".) It's, therefore, both a prefix and an abbreviation (it's an adjective in that it's an abbreviation for an adjective.)
    - steveklabnik 9y ago
      Yes, my slash was intended to be an 'and'. Good clarification, thanks.
- humanrebar 9y ago
  See, you get identified with new nouns and adjectives so that other people can better self identify. It's about letting people define themselves. Just not you per se.
dang 9y ago
This thread is breaking out in flames everywhere but here you made it even worse. Please don't post like this to HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14658514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14658514 and marked it off-topic.

fhoffa 9y ago

Data wise: According to the latest Stack Overflow survey, Rust is the language that women are the least interested in. Any thoughts on why? Row WantWorkLanguage responses perc_female 1 R 2477 11.87% 2 Ruby 3743 11.03% 3 Java 9409 8.42% 4 Python 11878 8.22% 5 SQL 10646 7.81% 6 Scala 2972 7.64% 7 JS 15451 7.37% 8 Swift 4282 7.36% 9 PHP 5039 7.22% 10 C# 9640 6.21% 11 C++ 7178 5.20% 12 Go 5500 4.87% 13 C 4536 4.83% 14 TypeScr 5435 4.51% 15 Haskell 2208 4.35% 16 Rust 2604 3.38% (related thread: https://twitter.com/felipehoffa/status/879806078866776064 https://twitter.com/felipehoffa/status/879806078866776064) SELECT WantWorkLanguage, COUNT(*) responses, FORMAT('%.2f%%', 100*COUNTIF(v='Female')/COUNT(*)) perc_female FROM ( SELECT SPLIT(WantWorkLanguage , '; ') WantWorkLanguage, Gender v FROM `fh-bigquery.stackoverflow.survey_results_public_2017` WHERE WantWorkLanguage!='NA' AND Gender!='NA' ), UNNEST(WantWorkLanguage) WantWorkLanguage GROUP BY 1 HAVING responses>2000 ORDER BY COUNTIF(v='Female')/COUNT(*) DESC

seanwilson 9y ago
I'd be interested to see more statistics but at a guess there's more female programmers in industries where Rust isn't relevant? Swift is probably only interesting if you're in an industry that would target iOS for example.
nickpsecurity 9y ago
Now this is a wild guess on feedback I've read from women. There's currently less of them coding for fun than men for cultural reasons but plenty are willing to learn a language to make money. Those in the top 10 are all over job ads. That by itself might skew women toward those languages.
- fhoffa 9y ago
  Interesting guess! Let's see. What if I take all mentions of each language on HN's who's hiring threads, vs % of women interested in each language? There is correlation! Chart: - http://i.imgur.com/mcN6Ghz.png http://i.imgur.com/mcN6Ghz.png If we take out the 2 outliers (r, go) - the correlation is 0.61. SELECT * FROM ( SELECT word, COUNT(*) c FROM ( SELECT SPLIT(REGEXP_REPLACE(LOWER(text), r'[^a-z]', ' '), ' ') words FROM `bigquery-public-data.hacker_news.full` WHERE parent IN ( SELECT id FROM `bigquery-public-data.hacker_news.full` WHERE title LIKE 'Ask HN: Who is hiring?%2017%' ) ), UNNEST(words) word WHERE LENGTH(word)>1 OR (word='r') GROUP BY 1 HAVING c>30 ) a JOIN ( SELECT LOWER(WantWorkLanguage) language, COUNT(*) responses, ROUND(100*COUNTIF(v='Female')/COUNT(*), 2) perc_female FROM ( SELECT SPLIT(WantWorkLanguage , '; ') WantWorkLanguage, Gender v FROM `fh-bigquery.stackoverflow.survey_results_public_2017` WHERE WantWorkLanguage!='NA' AND Gender!='NA' ), UNNEST(WantWorkLanguage) WantWorkLanguage GROUP BY 1 HAVING responses>2000 ) b ON a.word=b.language (caveat: "go" is an overloaded word)

throwasehasdwi 9y ago

Are you implying that Rust should be the first programming language of these minority groups? Given the complexity of low level programming that doesn't sound like a good idea. If that is not your plan then this is a pointless exercise. The cohort of existing programmers is highly biased in these same ways. The bigger Rust gets the more difficult it will be to maintain anything far from the average. If rust becomes as popular as say Java or C++ it will be statistically impossible to maintain anything but the average within the community.

steveklabnik 9y ago
> Are you implying that Rust should be the first programming language of these minority groups? No.
- throwasehasdwi 9y ago
  Did you read the rest? I appreciate a reply from the core team but you must understand your potential audience of Rust users is a highly gender/racial biased cohort. If Rust becomes popular it will become near impossible to deviate from the mean unless you engage in affirmative action by selectively removing community members in the majority. Edit: I'm not against these kinds of initiatives at all, I just don't think it's realistic to apply such goals to a free-form group of programming language users.
  - steveklabnik 9y ago
    > Did you read the rest? I did, but I disagree. You're making a large assumption, which is that the group will follow the demographic average. This is not true; individual programming languages' demographics differ from the overall population. And there's certainly no desire to "remove" anyone, selectively or not. It's about growing the pie, not placing artificial limits. Also, this initiative is not about people new to programming overall, it's about experienced people who may not know Rust or haven't found a way to get involved with Rust as a project.

Animats 9y ago

Focus on getting the printed books into bookstores and onto Amazon. Most are still stuck at "pre-order". Get someone who is not on the developer team or a fanboy to write a good Rust book. (Yes, there's "Rust Essentials", but from Amazon reviews, it's a thrown-together set of introductory material that just refers you back to the Rust web site.) Go had this problem in the early days. The early materials were totally uncritical, or in denial of, of Go's weaknesses. Things have improved; now the problems and limitations are better understood. Now people understand that shared data should be protected by ordinary mutexes, rather than using message passing of dummy messages as a locking system. Newer materials reflect this.

steveklabnik 9y ago
There are two that should hit print + Amazon this year, https://www.nostarch.com/Rust https://www.nostarch.com/Rust (mine) and http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920040385.do http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920040385.do

slang800 9y ago

> geekfeminism.org Yeah, that sounds like an unbiased source that will totally give you an accurate picture of how the average female feels about pronouns in documentation. /s

jlebar 9y ago
I am genuinely confused why you think a large portion -- if not a commanding majority -- of women in tech would not self-identify with "geek feminism". Naturally that website doesn't (can't) speak for all women in tech, but I never claimed that it did, and anyway that's an unreasonable standard to hold any website to. Let me make a more general point: Every time women and minorities come up on HN, I am so sad to see discussions like this. As much as we might not want to admit it, our community is toxic. This is why we need feminism, Black Lives Matter, and so on. This is why the Rust community needs to engage with women and other underrepresented groups. If you doubted that there is a problem, just read the comments here. I can only hope people will either learn how to be nice people, or decide to leave tech and be mean somewhere else. Being nice to people is actually kind of fun. You should try it.
- slang800 9y ago
  > I am genuinely confused why you think a large portion -- if not a commanding majority -- of women in tech would not self-identify with "geek feminism" According to YouGov, 23% of women identify as feminist, 5% are anti-feminist, and the rest are neither. Your opinion is probably skewed due to overrepresentation of feminists in media. http://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/tabs_gender_0411122013.pdf http://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/tabs_gender_0411122013.... > I can only hope people will either learn how to be nice people, or decide to leave tech and be mean somewhere else Nice people don't try to force identity politics down everyone's throats. Your comments are the ones that are "toxic".
  - jlebar 9y ago
    Do you think 23% of women is not a "large portion"? Let's imagine that only 23% of women care about being called "she" instead of "he". Do you think it's "forcing identity politics down everyone's throats" for them to ask to be referred to by their preferred pronoun? Because that's what we were discussing here. The anger this has engendered in you and others here is truly stunning.