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I'm not familiar around the syntax, but I'm interested to know how much of this was a religious battle and how much of it results in meaningful complications fo

I'm not familiar around the syntax, but I'm interested to know how much of this was a religious battle and how much of it results in meaningful complications for user code down the line. I've heard really good things about the Rust community (like nothing bad at all), until maybe two weeks ago when somebody mentioned this stuff. I'm a really big fan of not having religious battles. Is this syntax for native coroutines? Can it be combined with existing user and stdlib syntax? What pathways for syntax development does this decision cut off entirely, and pathways does it leave open? What did the Rust community / maintainers learn from this debate, and how can the Rust community avoid such battles in the future?

steveklabnik 7y ago
> I'm interested to know how much of this was a religious battle and how much of it results in meaningful complications for user code down the line. Due to the connotations of "religious battle", it's hard to get a good answer here. Nobody wants to be painted in this light. > Is this syntax for native coroutines? No. > Can it be combined with existing user and stdlib syntax? Yes. > What pathways for syntax development does this decision cut off entirely, and pathways does it leave open? Nothing outside of the async/await feature itself. > What did the Rust community / maintainers learn from this debate, and how can the Rust community avoid such battles in the future? This is too long for an HN comment :)
- ben509 7y ago
  > Due to the connotations of "religious battle", it's hard to get a good answer here. Nobody wants to be painted in this light. Haven't we all found ourselves lined up as one of a pair of camps over some heated dispute over a bit of minutiae? The whole time you know it's a bit silly, but not entirely and you feel compelled to continue to argue. Using a term like "religious battles" with tongue firmly in cheek is recognizing that we're prone to such things because we're human beings, by putting a lampshade on it.
  - steveklabnik 7y ago
    That requires strong social and interpersonal context, which is very difficult on the Internet.
  - oconnor663 7y ago
    This gets trickier when you have a community where some people practice religion in their daily life, and some people don't, and where the interactions between the two aren't always fun. It's not that the subject needs to be totally forbidden of course, but when it's just as easy to use different metaphors, we might as well.
- yingw787 7y ago
  @steveklabnik My apologies if I appeared to make light of the Rust community’s contributions. My definition of religious war is butting heads about problems that don’t have a clear right answer (tabs/spaces). If there are new things considered by the community that make the discussion worthwhile then it’s absolutely worth having; but if it causes people to burn out on the community down the line then maybe more moderation would be helpful. I have no experience leading anything like Rust, but I talked to contributors who burned out on Python and various libraries and it’s sad to see, so ideally Rust would forge a better path. My impression of async/await is that it’s one part of making concurrency grokkable, and I’m not sure whether the debate was taking all that into account: https://vorpus.org/blog/some-thoughts-on-asynchronous-api-design-in-a-post-asyncawait-world/#should-asyncio-be-fixed-to-have-a-curio-style-async-await-native-api https://vorpus.org/blog/some-thoughts-on-asynchronous-api-de...
  - steveklabnik 7y ago
    > My apologies if I appeared to make light of the Rust community’s contributions. Not at all! > My definition of religious war is butting heads about problems that don’t have a clear right answer (tabs/spaces). So this is where we get into the meat of it. I personally do believe that a lot of the discussion was around things that don't have a clear right answer. But (and the post mentions this a bit), that doesn't mean that it's inherently religious, it means that different people value different aspects of the solution differently. The big difference between this discussion and the tabs/spaces discussion is that each person can make their own call with tabs and spaces, but this syntax affects every user of Rust. That means we can't just say "well this is a religious debate, do whatever" because then the feature does not exist. > If there are new things considered by the community that make the discussion worthwhile then it’s absolutely worth having; but if it causes people to burn out on the community down the line then maybe more moderation would be helpful. Yes, it is a fine line. There's a lot to it, but it is something that people are thinking about, for sure. > I’m not sure whether the debate was taking all that into account I can assure you that the overall development of the feature took every possible thing into account. Part of the reason that this was so synatx focused is that the team spent multiple years working on the semantics. The syntax was all that was left. I am not 100% sure what you mean with the blog post link, as I'm not really a Python person, so I can't quite grok what you're talking about, exactly. If you can elaborate a bit I can too!

steveklabnik 7y ago

> I'm interested to know how much of this was a religious battle and how much of it results in meaningful complications for user code down the line. Due to the connotations of "religious battle", it's hard to get a good answer here. Nobody wants to be painted in this light. > Is this syntax for native coroutines? No. > Can it be combined with existing user and stdlib syntax? Yes. > What pathways for syntax development does this decision cut off entirely, and pathways does it leave open? Nothing outside of the async/await feature itself. > What did the Rust community / maintainers learn from this debate, and how can the Rust community avoid such battles in the future? This is too long for an HN comment :)

ben509 7y ago
> Due to the connotations of "religious battle", it's hard to get a good answer here. Nobody wants to be painted in this light. Haven't we all found ourselves lined up as one of a pair of camps over some heated dispute over a bit of minutiae? The whole time you know it's a bit silly, but not entirely and you feel compelled to continue to argue. Using a term like "religious battles" with tongue firmly in cheek is recognizing that we're prone to such things because we're human beings, by putting a lampshade on it.
- steveklabnik 7y ago
  That requires strong social and interpersonal context, which is very difficult on the Internet.
- oconnor663 7y ago
  This gets trickier when you have a community where some people practice religion in their daily life, and some people don't, and where the interactions between the two aren't always fun. It's not that the subject needs to be totally forbidden of course, but when it's just as easy to use different metaphors, we might as well.
yingw787 7y ago
@steveklabnik My apologies if I appeared to make light of the Rust community’s contributions. My definition of religious war is butting heads about problems that don’t have a clear right answer (tabs/spaces). If there are new things considered by the community that make the discussion worthwhile then it’s absolutely worth having; but if it causes people to burn out on the community down the line then maybe more moderation would be helpful. I have no experience leading anything like Rust, but I talked to contributors who burned out on Python and various libraries and it’s sad to see, so ideally Rust would forge a better path. My impression of async/await is that it’s one part of making concurrency grokkable, and I’m not sure whether the debate was taking all that into account: https://vorpus.org/blog/some-thoughts-on-asynchronous-api-design-in-a-post-asyncawait-world/#should-asyncio-be-fixed-to-have-a-curio-style-async-await-native-api https://vorpus.org/blog/some-thoughts-on-asynchronous-api-de...
- steveklabnik 7y ago
  > My apologies if I appeared to make light of the Rust community’s contributions. Not at all! > My definition of religious war is butting heads about problems that don’t have a clear right answer (tabs/spaces). So this is where we get into the meat of it. I personally do believe that a lot of the discussion was around things that don't have a clear right answer. But (and the post mentions this a bit), that doesn't mean that it's inherently religious, it means that different people value different aspects of the solution differently. The big difference between this discussion and the tabs/spaces discussion is that each person can make their own call with tabs and spaces, but this syntax affects every user of Rust. That means we can't just say "well this is a religious debate, do whatever" because then the feature does not exist. > If there are new things considered by the community that make the discussion worthwhile then it’s absolutely worth having; but if it causes people to burn out on the community down the line then maybe more moderation would be helpful. Yes, it is a fine line. There's a lot to it, but it is something that people are thinking about, for sure. > I’m not sure whether the debate was taking all that into account I can assure you that the overall development of the feature took every possible thing into account. Part of the reason that this was so synatx focused is that the team spent multiple years working on the semantics. The syntax was all that was left. I am not 100% sure what you mean with the blog post link, as I'm not really a Python person, so I can't quite grok what you're talking about, exactly. If you can elaborate a bit I can too!