> 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 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.
> 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.
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.
Can you point to an instance of offensive behaviour towards minorities in the Rust community? I'm not involved in Rust, and I have no strongly held opinions on the topic at hand. However I cannot recall coming across the abuse you describe on GitHub's issue trackers, nor in the IRC channels I frequent, nor somewhere else. Sure, just because I don't notice it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Same goes for biased wording in the docs.
A common line of argument is that "being more welcoming" will lead to more contributors and thus to more diverse perspectives. Browsing through Rust's documentation and bug tracker alone makes me skeptical of that. I can't find a thing that will turn away someone interested in Rust.
There's definitely sexism in the industry, no question. But I have yet to see someone present numbers of how e.g. their Code of Conduct lead to more contributors. I doubt that any of these undertakings do, unless the project really does have an asshole community. But Rust surely doesn't.
Some people will simply not engage in a project if there is no set code of conduct for it. The logic presumable being that even if there is no problem now, problem may come in the future, and a agreed upon code of conduct can nip such problems in the bud.
Or create problems, since they give a huge amount of leverage to those interested in dominating others through purely institutional/bureaucratic power games.
Rust draws on Coraline Ada's Code of Conduct ("Contributor Covenant") which was straight-up designed to force politics on people. She's aggressively pushed it in as many places as possible so they can ban people later for essentially saying what people like her disagree with in any forum (not just project itself). Here's one mob attack over a Twitter comment that didn't work featuring her with appearance of a Rust team member appearing to throw in some support. At one point, the political attackers set the maintainer up to look like he or she supports pedophiles. Dirty, dirty tactics pushing politics that don't even necessarily represent the beliefs of those they claim to protect. People in minority groups have a wide range of beliefs with many contradicting what these "social-justice warriors" act like they believe. They'll censor them, too, if deemed necessary.
I don't follow the Rust conversations enough to tell you anything about what goes on there. That they adopt and enforce a Code of Conduct designed for censorship of non-believers in that cause with a few, strong supporters on the team is enough to worry anti-censorship people. Regardless of Rust project or somewhere else, we opponents block it on grounds of fighting forced compliance with political views with no consensus. Fighting political domination on forums that are supposed to be about tech. That its author has hit many places from Opal to Github means we prefer to block her CoC even more.
Rather have a Code of Merit with clauses for keeping things civil. Minimal to no politics: just project-focused code, docs, and support of people in project-related conversations. That's it.
> Rust draws on Coraline Ada's Code of Conduct ("Contributor Covenant")
I have no idea what you're talking about. Rust's code of conduct is older than the Contributor Covenant, and we've modified it very, very slightly since its inception.
(I also disagree with the rest of your post as well, but that's offtopic and I don't particularly care to discuss it.)
Hmm. I may have assumed you used it because it's referenced in your Code of Conduct as source material. Googling it more gives me multiple sources:
1. Node.JS (semi-fitting of my post) and Contributor Covenant (target of my post) per current site.
2. Citizen Code of Conduct per Reddit. Looks just like Contributor with same provision that people must follow the politically-dominant group's rules on every forum or be blocked. It claims to be derived from Django Code of Conduct (partly-political/partly-good) and a feminism wiki. The latter mentions things like "Verbal comments that reinforce social structures of domination" with long list following to be subjectively evaluated according to their politics. Just like my post again.
So, even if your people did one before Contributor Covenant, it's similar to that pushed by the same kinds of people shoving politics down everyone's throat with some of the same content. My post still stands with the correction that you borrowed from different leftist, control-freak politicians initially with minimal modification from the one I mentioned. Each of the source are very clear about their political agenda and intended censorship.
Ahh. That got tested on another forum I was on. Painful memory that was a good example of how a huge chunk of the U.S. and many computing pioneers would possibly be censored based on their speech alone.
Yes! It is similar to how no amount of software process can protect you from one bad team member. Also, somehow that bad team/forum member always ends up being the person to use those processes or codes of conduct to crush others.
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.
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.
Because you don't benefit from half of your population if you only teach men to code. The same applies to other minorities. Of course it is essential that we can get everyone to code so that everyone can contribute in the future when a lot of work will require coding skills.
Frankly, the white male privledge guilt message is getting old. Programming is mostly self taught, through hours of social isolation researching and seeking it out. Short of writing politically neutral docs that focus on the subject at hand, there is no need to evangelize. It seems more arrogant than anything.
It's not supposed to be about guilt. It's supposed to be about empathy towards those who don't get that privilege.
(Side note: the word "privilege" is really poorly chosen, because in practice it has a strong implication of blame and guilt assignment in our culture.)
Starting when I was twelve, I worked for multiple summers doing landscaping to buy a computer; mowing yards, hauling wood bark, dirt, laying sod, ripping up sod.
It was hard, sweaty, backbreaking labor, especially for a 12 year old; I did it because I wanted to program. I used that computer to teach myself to program, and got my first real programming job from someone who I'd never previously met in person, over IRC.
According to today's identity politics, I need to be aware of my privilege as a white male nonetheless, and my position on the coarse-grained intersectional hierarchy of privilege.
I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to do with that once aware, or why they get to decide where everyone fits on that hierarchy on the basis of traits they deem important.
> According to today's identity politics, I need to be aware of my privilege as a white male nonetheless
Yup. That's because as a white male, you are still "privileged".
I'm using quotes here, because, as mentioned earlier, I don't think the word is a good fit for the concept it's supposed to describe. Privilege implies something above and beyond what you are normally entitled to; something that you don't necessarily deserve (I think that's the main reason why it elicits such a strong negative emotional response in people). As a white male, you are not getting such things - you're getting normal treatment, in a sense that no-one is making negative assumptions about your intellect, your ability to learn etc on the basis of your race or gender (they may well be making them based on other traits, and you can be underprivileged on the corresponding other axes). The problem is that others do get negative points solely on account of their gender, color of their skin, or even their name alone (http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html).
So you don't really have a "white privilege", but rather they have a "non-white handicap". It's not your fault - but because of said privilege, you're in a better position to try to correct it somewhat.
> I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to do with that once aware
Try to do what you can to even things out. I'm not even necessarily talking about politics, but just day to day things. Have you ever seen a female colleague being talked over in a meeting in your presence? Try to steer the discussion to give her voice. Ever been on a hiring interview loop, and heard dismissive racial or cultural stereotyping of a candidate based on their name alone ("I wonder if he codes like an Indian" etc)? Point it out. And so on.
The 'white' part is just as problematic. There are many other things that make life hard too. Having a mental illness, for example, or being molested/abused as a child. Yet no one talks about non-mentally-ill privilege or unmolested privilege. Just because skin color is something that can't be hidden when we go out in public doesn't elevate it above all the other difficulties or challenges in life. I've known people from all those groups and would say that depressives, schizophrenics and victims of molest have far more challenges in life than do minorities. Which is not to say that there aren't people who have more than one set of challenges, just that the focus on race and the implication that life is easy for someone who's white is not productive and frustrates people with other legitimate challenges in life.
This is, to me, why many reasonable people have a problem with identity politics. In an effort to bring awareness to the struggles of some, it actually ends up making others feel marginalized and their experiences minimized and is confrontational in nature. Empathy is about envisioning yourself in someone else's situation. The way we do identity politics today, it's the reverse. Instead of the desired, "I imagine myself in your position and I see how hard it must be" it's "I imagined myself in your position and, trust me, it's easier than mine."
I have a parent who is a psychologist. Growing up, I was taught that the right way to handle conflict was to always talk about your personal experience. Saying, "you're being insensitive" is accusatory, controversial and bound to cause an argument. Saying, "I feel unappreciated" is an unequivocally correct statement that can't be argued because no one else can know how you experience something. The only way to sort of refute that is to say, "I don't intend to make you feel that way." The problem with the term "white privilege" is that it's not a personal experience term. It's a term that encapsulates a projection of the white experience from the perspective of minorities. Anyone who doesn't feel they lead a privileged life will instinctively reject it. We need to be using terminology that's in line with the "I feel..." way of expressing oneself...terminology that helps convey the difficulties that some people face rather than the lack of difficulties everyone else faces.
> The 'white' part is just as problematic. There are many other things that make life hard too. Having a mental illness, for example, or being molested/abused as a child. Yet no one talks about non-mentally-ill privilege or unmolested privilege.
Actually yes, we do talk about that stuff as well. The things that you hear most - racial, gender, wealth and religious privilege - are talked about more simply because they affect proportionally more people.
The university I attended had females comprise 90% of all students in computer science, and over half of all students in engineering fields. Anecdotes are fun.
Maybe there's some magical place where you can actually learn how to program from someone else, but for the rest of us, there's no substitute for solitary hours grinding away actually doing the work.
> Are women really put off of computing because [people use male pronouns for programmers, assuming they're male]?
This doesn't need to be a hypothetical question. You could find a woman programmer and ask her. (A woman might even chime in on this thread, although given the ridiculous level of toxicity on this thread, if I were anything other than a het cis white man, I'd be staying the hell away from here.)
Or you could even Google it, and find some woman programmers talking about this. Here are a few references to get you started. https://geekfeminism.org/tag/pronouns/
By itself not much: but I see it as a necessary-but-insufficient step, in much the same way it is necessary to remove public statues deifying US Civil War Confederate "heroes" (I'd prefer the term "traitor"...).
> Are women really put off of computing because of that? It all seems so trivial.
Not "because of that" directly, no - of course not, but projecting an inclusive image is important to attract people who might not otherwise be interest for fear of not being a "cultural fit" despite having the skills. (Most) people are not robots: there is a very human need to feel accepted and fit-in.
I imagine I would feel the same way as the first wave of male nurses would have in the postwar years - with textbooks and instructional materials, even the job titles: Sister and Matron, reflecting a strong female bias.
I quickly went through the Wikipedia article on Men in Nursing just now to write this reply and it's already having me reconsider how I perceived gender bias in industry: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_in_nursing
> Considering the vast majority of programmers are male, does it really matter if we use male pronouns.
I'm not following that logic - if a reason to use male pronouns is that current programmers are male, then does it not follow that, yes, it actually matters?
(And if it doesn't matter, why care? Why not let the people who want to use other pronouns use other pronouns?)
> a way of investigating possible unconscious bias
There's other ways to address that too. I've used https://textio.com/ in the past for job ads and it's really interesting to see examples of how seemingly minor word choices can land depending on the reader. It'd be a relatively simple task to run documentation, RFCs and Github comments of core team members through such a service and automatically generate a report (which wouldn't have to be released publicly, but could be sent to authors to aid in using more inclusive language going forward).
The thing that's really difficult to do is to be inclusive in a way that doesn't feel exclusive towards people who aren't in the target demographics. Using these types of automated tools doesn't have that downside. Has anything like this been suggested/done by the people working on Rust?
Awesome. I see now that this context is two links away on the main page.
Its particularly interesting to note that the respondents gave a figure for LGB that falls within most estimates for population percentage (and hence doesn't form an underrepresented group here).
>Increased diversity could lead to new project-wide perspectives and overall community enrichment, if solely due to life-experience-based heterogeneity.
Are there any plans to measure the impact of this? That way the Rust project could show other projects the actual, concrete, benefits of diversity.
I'm not sure I see the waste here. Most people I know spend several hours each day doing things that will literally accomplish nothing. If you're arguing that effort is being wasted here, then I'd say your effort is being wasted on this issue, rather than, say, campaigning for the abolition of music and television and whatnot.
There are far smarter places to recover this spent effort, if that is your actual concern.
The currency of open source is time. Time is a zero-sum game on open source. Choosing to spend time on one task means choosing not to spend it on another.
Rust seems to spill an awful lot of words (which I translate to time) going "Look at US! We're magically delicious ... errr ... socially conscious! <jazz hands>".
However:
1) It's not my call as I'm nobody important to Rust.
2) The only downside is time. And maybe a couple of eyerolls from us old fogeys.
3) And, hey, if it cleans out a couple of real jerks or prevents one from joining then it's probably a net win on time.
Go read what the rust devs have written. They've spent a nearly insignificant amount of time on the issue of community diversity. One post among thousands, and we all better turn up the heat, because "oh my, the wasted effort! They used words that I didn't want to hear one time!"
If you're going to criticize how people spend their time, you'd better bring actual facts about how their time is really spent. One blog post and a few side discussions does not constitute a time investment problem. All you have here is a basic polite courtesy, and that's not something to object to.
Quite likely, the people that are capable of doing that sort of hard technical work are not capable of doing the soft, identity-politics ridden outreach functions, and vice versa.
Bang-up programmers are typically not the ones you want pressing flesh and pushing buzzwords.
> Increased diversity could lead to new project-wide perspectives and overall community enrichment, if solely due to life-experience-based heterogeneity.
One might wonder what benefits alternate uses for scarce resources spent chasing that "could" could provide instead.
This could be used as an argument against every effort that ever led to anything good in the world.
It's not that there aren't times and places it might be appropriate, but I think it'd be better to say precisely what and whose effort you wish to spend on something better and what that better thing is.
There's room for lots of people to pursue different, complimentary goals. If you really hope to tell other people that they should spend their energy on something other than the things they have chosen to think are important, you'll need a stronger argument than vague hints of mysterious opportunity costs.
Attention of people currently inside the community doing outreach and outside the community is finite. In analysis of their outreach efforts, I'd hope that they would know what the trade-offs are. I don't. Hence the question.
For me, both the assertion that no opportunity costs exist and the assertion that the/a top problem faced by an upstart systems language is the lack of representation in their community of people with attributes orthogonal to language development strain credulity.
And similarly, I know plenty of people who consider gender-inclusive policies as a form of psuedoscience too (in that they don't give it much credence).
Diversity is quite literally the reason life still exists after billions of years and five mass extinction catastrophes. It is the foundation for the predominant economic system in human society as well as all of the technological and scientific progress we've made. Hell, you can't even really have cultural (in the broadest sense) progress without a diversity of ideas and opinions, let alone a functioning, stable democracy.
I'm skeptical of race- and gender-inclusive policies because they're often blindly implemented and detrimental to their goals but diversity has shown itself to be not just important, but vital, to the long term success of any large, complex system, whether it be the Apollo program or our planet's ecosystem. I'd love to hear rational arguments against, however.
> diversity has shown itself to be not just important, but vital, to the long term success of any large, complex system, whether it be the Apollo program or our planet's ecosystem.
No, it's causation. The probability that everything goes right in a sufficiently complex system is zero and the probability that a single failure will cause runaway feedback loops or cascading side effects is extremely high, which causes a stable system to go unstable and makes total failure almost inevitable. Without diversity, you can't recover from these failure modes (drastic changes in the ecosystem causing extinction in the case of evolution, limits of physics or economics causing a dead end in science and engineering, changes in the rest of the economy causing centrally planned economies to fall apart, etc).
That is a contrived counterexample that completely ignores the very basics of evolution and how changing environments help drive adaptation. Picking out one irrelevant trait here and asking if diversity is useful is like asking "how much value is there in diversity of spleens in the Rust Community?" They don't care about spleens, they care about people who are interested in Rust; just like natural selection favors organisms who can reproduce, not individual traits.
Natural selection will favor the animals who don't have to waste energy on pigmentation... until a billion years later when a sink hole opens up or one of the species evolves bio luminescence and all the organisms that lack pigments start to reflect all incoming light back at their new, hungry predators. That's the whole point: environments change all the time and the chance of a species surviving is dependent on the diversity of its members, just like the survival of carbon based life through a planetary mass extinction event is dependent on the diversity of species.
Evolution can only happen through random mutation so, by definition, any environment with evolving life forms is always changing unpredictably.
How do you know the (heavily politicized, myopically chosen, inescapably coarse-grained) identity groups they're targeting offer a form of diversity that actually has value in the realm of Rust? Why do you believe that these identity group traits correlate strongly with intellectual diversity that is necessary for the project's health?
If anything, this process (and the efforts from which it stems) seem purposefully designed to eliminate intellectual diversity, in favor of a rigid monoculture maintained by empowering political officers in the enforcement of right-think.
Based on your choice of words and other comments you've made, I believe you fear change and people who are different from you. I doubt there is anything I can say to convince you in the face of your prejudices, whatever they may be.
> If anything, this process (and the efforts from which it stems) seem purposefully designed to eliminate intellectual diversity, in favor of a rigid monoculture maintained by empowering political officers in the enforcement of right-think.
If your idea of a monoculture is a place where people have to be respectful of other people & cultures and not use culturally charged words then I think almost everyone in the Rust community would be happy with that outcome.
If you want to provide evidence that the Rust community is trying to eliminate intellectual diversity in favor of superficial qualities instead of sincerely trying to outreach to underrepresented communities that may have a lot to offer, I'm sure they (and we here on HN) will be happy to have a rigorous, respectful debate with the express goal of improving the experience for as many people in the community as possible, including you.
Until then, you are free to grind your axe elsewhere, perhaps somewhere without multiculturalism to make you so uncomfortable.
I don't think it's "fear of change" or "fear of people who are different" - not even "fear". I feel the sentiment felt is closer to "think poorly-of". Southern US racists certainly aren't "afraid" of black people: I believe they've been conditioned by negative racial stereotypes combined with their own sense of superiority ("blacks are lazy, no-good", "blacks are criminals", et cetera) so the idea of racial equality simply strikes them as silly - take that concept and apply it to today's debates: ("feminists are loud and unruly", "transgender people are freaks", "the other side are all fat women with purple hair who spend too much time complaining on their blogs instead of instigating real change"). I stress these are stereotypes, and certainly not representative, but doubling-down in response seems to reinforce certain negative stereotypes and make it harder to sell the idea of the "new normal".
I believe their concerns about the loss of "intellectual diversity" are genuinely felt - but frame it as someone who genuinely believes themselves and their opinions to be level-headed and that these new voices, who are telling them that their opinion are wrong, will of course put someone on the defensive, it's only natural to feel a creep of thoughtcrime policing.
I hate to use a cop-out cliché but I feel that "both sides" need to apply empathy when engaging in debate with their opposition: those that feel out of place and get defensive, or simply think these are overblown matters, are not deliberately out to actually oppress anyone - and those campaigning for more equitable treatment are not being opportunistic.
Well, an open challenge that might help someone understand what I actually think, at least along one axis:
Let's say I want to objectively evaluate the notion that there is such a thing as an arbitrary, self-declared, non-binary "gender" (or "gender identity") that can range across any number of "genders".
In that case, can you specify the set of propositions used to classify something as a "gender"?
Is your definition purely self-referential (cyclic)?
Does your definition exclude other social self-identifications, such as "goth" or "emo"? Why or why not?
Does your definition rely on references to "biological sex" (e.g. male/female)? If so, what are the sexes "male" and "female"?
Matters of personal-identity are completely orthogonal to what the Rust community should be about.
Reading your posting, I think you're implying that non-traditional notions of gender is evidence of irrational thinking, and you think Rust community would be better-off with an exclusively "rational" (by your measure) membership.
My retort is that it is completely irrelevant - I compare it to admitting open young-earth creationists simultaneously with adherents to Wahhabism into the Rust community: both of those positions (in my opinion) are as irrational and non-evidence-based as otherkin or your notion of gender-identity, and yet all of those individuals are capable of making valuable contributions to the language, the runtime, the standard library, packages and so on - accepting their work has nothing to do with condoning or endorsing their opinions (for example we still call radiation meters Geiger counters, even though Hans Geiger worked on Nazi nuclear weapons).
I won't respond to your questions posed because it's both outside the scope of this discussion and I believe poses a dangerous distraction to identify a wedge with which you can coarsely separate people into groups you think you would agree with - and more importantly: we should not be pontificating on gender-identity because none of us are subject matter experts in the field.
That's like refusing a fresh cheeseburger because you're afraid that by the time you bite into it, it'll develop botulism - even as you're minutes away from starving to death. You're nitpicking tiny details and dismissing a clear improvement because it does not conform perfectly to your idealized standards. Life is messy, people make mistakes. That just means we keep moving forward and self correcting when we need to not when we make up entirely hypothetical downsides, most of which never end up happening anyway. I repeat, again: you have provided zero evidence for your claims that the Rust team is doing the wrong thing or heading in the wrong direction.
This insistence on using hypotheticals instead of providing evidence screams fear; not a rational evaluation of the community and its plans. It's the same tired strategy used by conservatives for thousands of years to fight literacy, education, suffrage, abolition of slavery, welfare, universal healthcare, and pretty much everything good that has happened in human society. No one but its rhetorical peddlers take it seriously because it is purely self defeating: if you're too paralyzed by hypothetical issues to take the first step, then those issues will never be resolved, freeing you from facing the uncomfortable change ahead.
> I don't think it's "fear of change" or "fear of people who are different" - not even "fear". I feel the sentiment felt is closer to "think poorly-of". Southern US racists certainly aren't "afraid" of black people: I believe they've been conditioned by negative racial stereotypes combined with their own sense of superiority ("blacks are lazy, no-good", "blacks are criminals", et cetera) so the idea of racial equality simply strikes them as silly - take that concept and apply it to today's debates: ("feminists are loud and unruly", "transgender people are freaks", "the other side are all fat women with purple hair who spend too much time complaining on their blogs instead of instigating real change"). I stress these are stereotypes, and certainly not representative, but doubling-down in response seems to reinforce certain negative stereotypes and make it harder to sell the idea of the "new normal".
Prejudice, like all elements of human psychology, is complicated but the longer you're around it the more you start to see distinct patterns emerge, each with their own rhetorical strategies. I think in this case it is fear because teacup50 only mentions the people who Rust is targeting with their outreach in passing and even implies that he agrees (or at least "doesn't disagree," whatever that means) with the goals of the effort. I see no evidence that he thinks of minorities, women, etc. as beneath him so it leads me to believe that he views the explicit effort of including them as an attack on the integrity of the community and - by implication - his own identity (let's assume ftm he's part of the Rust community but it could also be him lashing out because of the same thing happening elsewhere). It's not necessarily that the new people will make it worse, but that it is the process of bringing those people into the fold that will do the actual harm. It's defensive tribalism in its most fundamental form: fear, uncertainty, and doubt. I'd even hesitate to even call it prejudice - it's really more like a visceral reaction to a perceived loss of or attack on status - but in practice, the two are hard to differentiate and at some point you have to stop giving the person the benefit of the doubt and start calling a spade a "spade."
> I believe their concerns about the loss of "intellectual diversity" are genuinely felt - but frame it as someone who genuinely believes themselves and their opinions to be level-headed and that these new voices, who are telling them that their opinion are wrong, will of course put someone on the defensive, it's only natural to feel a creep of thoughtcrime policing.
I agree wholeheartedly. I distinctly remember several situations on the rust users mailing list and /r/rust where I felt that Rust team members (not the community but the official Rust team) went way too far into the realm of thoughtcrime policing to the detriment of the community. I've been waiting for him to bring those up as evidence of his position so that we can have a merit based discussion on how to avoid such mistakes in the future but he has done nothing but provide unsubstantiated opinions and hypothetical questions meant to lead someone towards his foregone conclusion (even though he frames it as doubt, another common but transparent rhetorical tactic).
> I hate to use a cop-out cliché but I feel that "both sides" need to apply empathy when engaging in debate with their opposition: those that feel out of place and get defensive, or simply think these are overblown matters, are not deliberately out to actually oppress anyone - and those campaigning for more equitable treatment are not being opportunistic.
Again, I agree wholeheartedly. This is an important conversation to have because otherwise, the entire process threatens to devolve into extreme multiculturalism for multiculturalism's sake. That is not only counterproductive but outright dangerous because it does nothing but polarize otherwise compatible groups of people. Every few decades our culture seems to hit that political correctness peak really hard which just causes another backlash from those who feel they are marginalized. The current (disastrous) political situation in the United States is clear evidence of that polarization and backlash - and it's not doing anyone a lick of good.
Even if I axiomatically disagree with someone's arguments, I am happy to engage and come to a middle ground where we make as many people as happy as possible just like I'd engage a flat earther who presents concrete evidence, if only to show him that he is misinterpreting it. However, just like most flat earthers, teacup has refused to provide any evidence other than a gut feeling and that is in no way a genuine attempt at constructive dialogue.
Or I could be dead wrong. He could just be playing a devil's advocate who is really, really bad at communicating.
The science is bad and the politics are deleterious. That has nothing to do with prejudices on my part; thinking that the methodology and behavior is naively toxic at best doesn't mean I disagree with the egalitarian aims that are claimed to be the motivating factor behind this political ideology.
What science and what politics? Why are they bad or deleterious? Why are they naively toxic? Can you provide any examples? I'd be happy with just one because even an isolated incident can be learned from and used to improve the community.
You can't claim to agree with their egalitarian aims and then absolutely refuse to provide constructive feedback or even any evidence of your claims that their behavior is naive, myopic, counter-productive, etc. It's the logical equivalent of "I'm not racist but..." followed with a comment about how other races have smaller brains as if its a statement of fact with no evidence to back it up.
>> 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.
> 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.
Absolutely. People don't always know at a conscious level why they do or don't do things. It's part of the reason why user surveys are a poor substitute for telemetry on how an app is actually used in the real world.
..except that here, we haven't worked out the brain-computer interface yet.
The final diagnosis is not necessarily what the patient thinks it is, but it would be grossly negligent to not ask the patient about all information they think might be relevant.
They ask what the symptoms are. They do not ask the patient to determine what the cause is.
Rust's methodology suffers from severe self-selection bias and politically motivated thinking. It will unerringly produce the answers its creators want to hear; if it does not, the methodology and subject selection will "corrected" to produce such answers.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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?
>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.
Well, you can certainly ignore all that and just use the language. Nothing forces you to do these things, they're just forcing themselves to do these things.
It's a small faction of people that self identify as cissomething. Much of modern cultural discussions are about language: what is "marriage" for instance, what does "gender" mean, what is "racist", what is "privilege". Asking people to give up and use someone else's language is unfair. In different ways respectable thinkers like Orwell and Chomsky say language is very important.
And I think the position being espoused but misunderstood is that people would like to take different approaches to promoting diversity (perhaps by being personally inclusive and politically neutral) but these sorts of codes of conduct are not conducive to those approach. It's not fair to say this is the way to improve the situation. Or that the situation can be improved this way at all. It may be shocking to people comfortable in American coastal culture, but this sort of thing is controversial (look at this thread!) and unnecessarily combative to people from other cultures.
Furthermore, it's not inclusive to many people because it takes a specific viewpoint in many complicated but intentional ways.
>Well, you can certainly ignore all that and just use the language. Nothing forces you to do these things, they're just forcing themselves to do these things.
I am old and non-native English speaker and I love Rust. Thus I would have liked to participate and I could have ticked some of the boxes. The funding to a conference of my choice would certainly have been very welcome.
Then I tried to reflect on it more honestly. Does my age and my not so good English really make me into such a valuable contributor to a Rust conference? I do not think so. Other qualities might but you do not list those. So I ended up excluding myself.
To clarify then: when I wrote that I am not interested in your obsession with identity politics, what I really meant was that, as a condition of active entry to the Rust community.
Not OP, but at my workplace, we never discuss sexual orientation, race, religious belief or gender of coworkers, because that would be very unprofessional.
So, no, I can't ignore all that and just us the language. I can't use a language in a professional context when I consider the core team to be unprofessional. But that's a nice social experiment and I'll probably use rust for my personal projects.
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.
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?
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
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.
Obviously you are interested in identity politics, because instead of passing over the bits that bored you in silence (were you otherwise riveted by every other bit of the article) you felt compelled to take time out of your busy day to post this.
To expand the point, hopefully less snarkily: making specific statements about how politics are 'uninteresting' to you is itself a political statement ("Your politics are not worth talking about"). In a weird way, I agree, in that the rest of the post appears to practically have gone undiscussed in order to allow commenters to harrumph about words like 'cis'.
Or, more succinctly: a big clue about what someone is interested in is what they are claiming they are not interested in. The things people are really not interested in, they don't talk about. :)
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".
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.
MINIX 3 or OC.L4 would be candidates. QNX could use it as an extra differentiator. For now, the only things like that that I recall off top of head are Muen done with provably safe SPARK language and Redox done in Rust language.
There's Redox, which is progressing nicely, already boots in a VM and on some real hardware, and has a GUI and networking, and is intended to be a real general purpose OS someday.
There's also intermezzOS, which is a (still being written) "build-your-own-OS" tutorial project that uses Rust.
It's also worth noting that Rust isn't magic and especially when doing very low-level stuff the use of unsafe blocks is unavoidable. On the other hand, by isolating unsafe behavior you know where it is and can test it very carefully and keep it as contained as possible.
As more people use Rust and we see all the cases where unsafe is typically used, could more unsafe code patterns be formalized as safe code?
Are there any situations where unsafe code cannot be avoided at all, where there exists a program-theory proof that unsafe code must be used?
If it's for performance reasons, then a new safe language construct could be introduced to replace it - such as how a safe range-based loop eliminates the need for bounds-checking with fixed-length arrays.
For many uses this is already happening, but for writing an OS, there's no getting around the fact that you're going to need to, say, write to or read from a specific hard-coded memory address that, for a given platform, is magically mapped to a hardware register. That's always going to be unsafe. Certainly, though, Rust lets you sequester that kind of code away and isolate it from things that can be expressed safely.
I'll add that there's already tooling in Frama-C, SPARK Ada, and some proof assistants to prove safety of some of those operations. So, if they can't be safe, then a mock-up of them can be done in something that can prove their safety externally with proven component integrated into Rust. Eventually Rust itself might have such a capability but the external tools can work intermediate.
Not an OS, but Mozilla is rapidly updating pieces of Firefox with Rust (with lots of ideas & code coming from Servo). And while browsers don't necessarily match the complexity of modern operating systems, I think that having Rust be part of something as complex as a browser will be good for Rust and systems programming.
The problem is systems software is hard and takes awhile.
While HTML/CSS/JavaScript have historic oddities these only go back 15-20 years. x86/IBMPC legacy has 40years of horrible decisions burned into it.
To that end there is a lot of progress in the systems world, but core infrastructure isn't something you just rewrite/replace overnight.
* Redox is a full micro-kernel OS from scratch [1]
* Rustls is a TLSv1.3 compliant server [2]
* Ring is _mostly_ Rust (uses some C for where Rust doesn't work) [3]
* Subtle is consistent time library for building crypto libraries with [4]
* An entire webbrowser (well the JS is still C++) [5]
* A terminal emulator [6]
* A grep replacement [7]
* A non feature complete tar archiver that supports gzip, bzip2, xz, zstd, brotli, and lz4 [8]
The real challenge is Rust has been _released_ for 2 years now. C is approaching 50 years old. C/C++ has _a lot_ of momentum, history, and existent libraries.
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
I don't think this statistic actually means much without a lot more analysis. Here's some things that could (not necessarily do) contribute to it:
We may simply be seeing that female Rust users use stack overflow less than male ones (normalized to other languages). Rust provides lots of other places to ask questions, /r/rust (including the "Got an easy question thread"), https://users.rust-lang.org/, the rust irc (and various other irc's for various major libraries). These may simply be more attractive to women than stack overflow (normalized relative to how attractive they are to men). They all prominently display the code of conduct, are more welcoming to new users (at least in my mind), less likely to criticize you for asking a bad question, care less about having you maintain a identity that is linked to your real name, etc.
It could also be a result of gender differences in answering survey's. Maybe male rust users are more willing to say they "want work" in a language they are unlikely to find work in. Maybe they are more inclined to click "want work" in every language they are vaguely familiar with (v.s. actually being proficient in) than women. Etc.
We also might be seeing that the niche rust fits in simply has less female presence than most other languages. Perhaps on average women are less inclined to experiment with new languages. Are more likely to be working in the sciences maybe (which would explain R and Python being high). Etc.
I would hazard to guess that women are less interested in systems programming (domains that Go, C++, C, Rust target). These are generally older careers, while many efforts are focusing on younger female programmers who are going to be more interested in what is popular ATM (web, data mining). Adding age to this table might add more insight.
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.
Without a comparison to men, this is pretty hard to make judgements based on. For all I know from that data, there might be an even lower interest level among men for Rust.
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.
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
Be even better if you could do it against a summary of appearances in job postings at major job sites. That will represent more of the market women are working in probably. They might have summary data you can use on the languages if not the actual postings.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
To be clear, your last paragraph (EDIT: now removed) weirdly conflates Rust with Mozilla; only one person on Rust teams live in Mountain View, many (most?) people on the teams are not Mozilla employees, and this isn't about Mozilla hiring people.
Your observation about the current makeup is in fact what we would like to change, and your suggestion to reach out to people is what this post is intended to do.
The first bit is useful information. It means you had a ton of minority talent to draw on instead of one location and company. The second means you all talked about this stuff since the beginning without actually doing it or not many on team cared as much. That was the point of the critique. I'll throw out some suggestions, though, instead of just critiquing as my own principles are about helping a project that's doing important good work. Regardless of diversity issues, I still congratulate you people on that and hope you continue to improve across the board. :)
There's two easy ones that you can do on the team side and maybe in some form on the community side. You and the others are simply more knowledgeable at working with communities so I leave it to you to find what applies. Here they are:
1. Supply side. Talk to people doing these bootcamps, conferences, and so on focusing on minorities in general or specific minority groups. They probably know people in the demographic who can code well. Send people there to talk about Rust like you seem to do in general at conferences and such. Also, invite all in these groups to send in references or Githubs relevant to specific jobs. Give them resources to learn it. Get those that want to get a job or place in the community to get on the forums for help learning and/or submitting code/docs. Encourage, but don't require, them to do it blind under an alias with no info on race/age/gender. Without biases limiting them and with increasing supply, the percentage of minority talent should increase naturally.
2. Quota side. Do something like that plus ads for talent in general. Get a supply of people from many backgrounds with some way to evaluate whether they are capable of performing the role. They all "earned" their place rather than just token hires since each seems to be a decent or good hire. The "best" of all programmers is pretty subjective concept with strong possibility of bias anyway. Then, do quotas for the hiring slots with those brought in chosen randomly with right spread or best rated of each group. A lot of the local businesses out here are, despite the South's racial issues, quote diverse even up to a layer or two of management by just (a) hiring anyone who might be able to do the job, (b) giving them some training/coaching, and (c) keeping those that perform well. Works wonders but I mention other things first since there's few jobs to go around at high cost on your end.
> The second means you all talked about this stuff since the beginning without actually doing it or not many on team cared as much.
This is extremely not true. We have actively cared about this for a long time, and we've been doing work towards it basically forever, with some progress. This is the latest effort. There is no silver bullet.
All you'd have to do is get a large list of people in minorities who did work similar to each of the jobs you'd need to do. At least a handful for each one but preferably more if you had time. Then, send them detailed offers with follow-up interviews to see if they could perform. You'd have more of them on your team afterward.
Did you all do that? And do you have any data on it so interested outsiders can see what caused the failures and how to prevent that in the future?
Based on your use of the words jobs, offers, interviews, etc it sounds like you're assuming that being on a Rust team is a paid job. This is not the case. Mozilla indeed employs a lot of the people on the teams, but I have my own company, for example. I do not get paid because of my membership on the teams. And there are people who work on Rust at Mozilla who are not on the teams; these are a disjoint set.
That's indeed news to me. The press releases had me assuming otherwise. I appreciate you and Steve telling me so I can get better accuracy in future conversations. What's the split of paid people to volunteers on the page I linked? Especially in compiler, language, library, and community teams?
Out of almost 60 distinct people, roughly 15 are employed by Mozilla by my quick count. It gets a bit fuzzy because some people have done things like been an intern, did a few months on contract, or something else, but that's the current count.
Well, it's cool you have so many volunteers. Also, the lack of diversity isn't as bad as it initially appeared if we're including volunteers. There could be bias but donating time/money for good things must be a good thing by default. :) The critiques would only still apply on hiring level if the 15 were mostly white males in circumstances where more minorities could've been hired. Any suggestions or brainstorming would also still apply since they address the supply or acceptance side rather than just Rust specifically. It's just one instance where the techniques can benefit.
The approach we're taking here is basically the opposite of what you're advocating; I am not aware of any open source projects that email people asking them to contribute. I would find it extremely odd if someone did that to me. Putting out a call for contributors, on the other hand, is pretty usual.
"The approach we're taking here is basically the opposite of what you're advocating; I am not aware of any open source projects that email people asking them to contribute."
I'm not saying it common or anything haha. I'm just offering sending messages to people about a project that fits their expertise as a way to boost number of people that know about it and might contribute. This is with assumption that whatever qualified minorities candidates aren't seeing the opportunity or nobody has nudged them to act on it. If for other reasons, this might have no effect.
Of course, one must balance against overdoing it or we get posts about "Rust zealots" blasting messages at everyone. Very selective based on talent with personalized messages with no commitment required. I've gotten a few people interested in experimenting with approaches to automated testing and coding in SPARK Ada just sending occasional emails or messages. Although, most come to me after I post in different places with different types of people/projects that might find them useful. Also, I speculate maybe on web forum side looking for forums with higher percentage of minority programmers or just experimenters/makers where you do your normal thing sharing interesting posts about Rust or its ecosystem.
Just some extra brainstorming. I agree there's no silver bullet. It will require lots of experimentation, measurement, listening, and time above all.
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.)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I am a "geek" male in the industry. My wife worked in the industry and others in non technical roles and is not herself a geek. Her education was in sociology so I asked her about what makes tech more toxic to women. Her answer surprised me. She said that it wasn't. That the other fields she worked in were the same. The difference was two fold. Male geeks interact differently with women and a slight that might seem rakish at first glace from a lawyer is immediately perceived for what it is coming from a geek. But the more important half by far, that I never thought of in my self accusation, is that female geeks also interact differently from other females. A slight that my wife would shrug off, just making a mental note about the guy, her geek female coworkers were eaten up by. It hurt them deeply. In short I don't think our community is more toxic than others, it is just that it is more evident in ours. Anyone can be offended by anything so two approaches are needed. Train against what is most commonly offensive, but also train on how to be offended less easily by people who are being offensive.
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 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.