Re:Writing a Linux-compatible kernel in Rust
by sammorrowdrums on Tuesday October 26, 2021 @07:37AM
(#28999073)
This is true in politics and religion as well, the outward facing representation of a group is often defined by its loudest proponents. They are often not representative of the group. But external perception is still important and easily shaped by loud / repeat voices.
Disavowing certain behaviours works on a personal level, but otherwise people who wield power in such groups have to try and use that power to try to improve external perception often in spite of the many vocal members of the group.
The world is full of self-selected spokespeople.
It's similar to when you try to generalize over nationalities. While there may be some small truth in it over very large numbers, there's always going to be plenty of exceptions so that making such generalizations should ALWAYS be considered inappropriate, be it "negative" or not. Even more so when there are large minorities within the community.
I do agree that the RIIR is likely to be one of these minorities, but that doesn't make them NOT part of the Rust community.
Another "minority" in the Rust community that I have noticed a lot in my projects/blog posts is made up of those who are never satisfied with any Rust code: there's always some better way to write something, or some more efficient implementation, and your code definitely sucks... Rust is a very large language with many features, so there's always a lot of ways to do things, but even two extremely highly skilled Rust developers are highly likely to disagree on which way is "the best" for a certain non-trivial design decision... the fear of not using the best alternative and being ridiculed by other Rust developers claiming my approach is bad makes me quite cautious about showing Rust code in any blog post I write.
But I still don't want to claim this is a characteristic of "the Rust community", just like I would hesitate to say "the Rust community is very welcoming".
We probably just need to stop the human impulse to generalize about groups of people, that's all.