Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs - Episode 132: RustConf Drama

Episode Date: June 2, 2023

In this episode, Conor and Bryce chat about the Rust Conf drama and other upcoming conferences.Link to Episode 132 on WebsiteDiscuss this episode, leave a comment, or ask a question (on GitHub)TwitterADSP: The PodcastConor HoekstraBryce Adelstein LelbachShow NotesDate Recorded: 2023-05-31Date Released: 2023-06-02Programming Languages Festival (Feb 2024) KickStarterRustConfRustConf Drama (ThePhd’s Post)ThePhd on TwitterJT’s PostCppNorthRust FoundationRust Trademark DebacleCrabLangGCC Front-End For RustCrystal LanguageLambdaDays 2023Italian C++ 2023HaskellElixirBryce’s Haskell TweetArrayCast Episode on KX ConC++NowIntro Song InfoMiss You by Sarah Jansen https://soundcloud.com/sarahjansenmusicCreative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0Free Download / Stream: http://bit.ly/l-miss-youMusic promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/iYYxnasvfx8

What the, what the heck, man? You're taking to me at caves. Also, is this, is Mercury Mine? The first thing I think when I hear Mercury Mine is like Bryce is trying to kill me with mercury poisoning because I know if you have too much tuna sushi, you die. That's what happens. Welcome to ADSP The Podcast, episode 132, recorded on May 31st, 2023. My name is Connor, and today with my co-host Bryce, we talk about the latest RustConf drama and our upcoming conferences. Before we hop into today's episode, I just wanted to give a quick

plug for a Kickstarter that's being run by a colleague of mine, Tom Palmer, who is more commonly known as Context Free, either on Twitter or on YouTube. He is running a Kickstarter for what he is calling the Programming Languages Festival, which is a new potential conference that's going to be held in February of next year. That's 2024. And it is going to be a two-day single track conference, most likely held in Phoenix, Arizona. And the Kickstarter has been running for, I think, a week or two. I meant to plug it earlier, but forgot. By the time this comes out, we'll be just under two weeks, so I believe a week and a half left on the Kickstarter. There are multiple ways you can pledge. There's like a $20 level, a $50,

a $100. But I would recommend if you're interested in going to this conference, pledge a full ticket pledge, which is $495. And obviously, this isn't going to go through unless if the Kickstarter succeeds, which I think it's at the 25% mark. But if enough people sign up for the full pledge, this, you know, might actually come into fruition, which is exciting, because I think this is going to be a conference similar to Strange Loop, which Strange Loop is ending this year. So I think Strange Loop 2023, which is a sort of ending this year. So I think StrangeLoop 2023, which is a sort of esoteric programming languages, functional programming-esque conference that's been going on for, I think, over a decade. This is going to be its final year. So hopefully this will be the start

of a new programming languages-focused conference. Just to highlight a few of the speakers, Andrew Kelly, the founder of the Zig language, is going to be speaking. I'm going to be speaking. Gabriela Gonzala, founder of the Dahl language. Jean-Huidh Manid, who's going to get mentioned in today's episode, he's going to be speaking. We've got Walter Bright, founder of the D language.

A bunch of other folks who I'm less familiar with, Sabree Blackmon, Oscar Spencer, Evan Ovadia, Don Wages. So people from all different corners of the programming language universe. If you're interested, top link in the description will be to the Kickstarter. Feel free to back this project if you're interested in seeing something like this come to life. I'm leaving for Europe in a month. I'm leaving for Europe for a month in about six hours, and now I've got to go get new glasses.

That's just excellent. Are they going to be able to turn that around I mean Lenscrafters has a one hour guarantee and um I'm going to tell sunglasses I'm going to tell you the story of how I got this particular pair of sunglasses because I have not one but two

pairs of prescription sunglasses just uh just wait though wait though you're on a limited time pairs of prescription sunglasses. Just wait, though. Wait, though. You're on a limited time budget here. I'm telling the damn story, man. And I am going to 10x this story. You're not going to 10x this story. It's a good start.

I 10x'd your last story. There was actually a couple people that said, hey, we're never going to find out who it was that disappeared, never to be heard of again. The year was 2019. And I was in Hawaii for the C++ committee meeting. And Hana and I went snorkeling. And I had forgotten to bring my sunglasses on this trip, which if you're in Hawaii is a pretty, pretty

bad thing to forget. Um, but we spent one day where we did a day trip to Honolulu. We flew to Honolulu for the day to visit my cousin. And so when we get to Honolulu, um, first thing we do, we get the rental car, we go to a LensCrafters and I tell them, how serious are you about your one hour guarantee? Because in three hours I got to be on a plane. And, uh, and they, they And they got it done in time. So LensCrafters it is.

Can't 10X that. That was too quick of a story for you to 10X. That was short and sweet. That was short and sweet. I think the listener would be upset if they only heard your chipmunk voice for like five seconds and they'd be like, that must have been a short story. Why didn't he just let it air so you know what bryce we'll keep that one in just because it was short and sweet and it did have to do so it did took place at a

c++ conference upcoming road trip that we're taking to slovenia you don't need to like sleep or eat right because i i don't really have time for you to sleep, Reed. We'll talk about maybe some technical stuff in this short recording here. But let's just say, folks, I'm a little bit introvert Connor. Baseline introvert Connor is a little bit concerned. Because let me actually open up our Twitter discussion. And first of all, Bryce is doing most of the planning. I'm totally fine with that. I'll do most of the driving.

We're a team. All right, here we go. This is on Saturday, a couple days ago. Are you okay? This is Bryce. Are you okay skipping lunch one day of the road trip? I respond, lol, what does skip lunch mean? I mean, it's pretty straightforward he replies there is a day where lunch is not in the schedule folks this is at 10 43 p.m on saturday

this is the moment i discovered that there is an itinerary a schedule that is so detailed for weeks okay nobody nobody i i invite i create a tripet for every one of my trips and I invite everybody in my – like who's applicable to the trippet. And I still get questions every week or two. My mom is like, where are you going? What are you doing? I'm like, you're on it to the trippet. Literally my entire life is there for you to see. But she – the trip it literally my entire life is there for you to see but she so here's i've actually i have

looked at the trip it but the main page that when you click on it actually wait let i'm gonna pause that let's get back to the conversation and we'll finish this we'll finish this that's 10 43 he's saying that we gotta skip lunch i don't reply immediately four minutes minutes later, 10.47 p.m. This is Saturday night. Also, how much sleep do you need? To which I replied two minutes later, lol, what is going on? And I ask if there's room in the schedule for my runs because I'm already in Europe. I'm in Wroclaw, Poland right now. And this is how we operate. We go – yesterday we went for 17K run.

Today we went for 21K run. We see the city by running around, taking some photos, had a couple donuts this morning, both sprinkles. Absolutely amazing. We low-key. We here in Europe, we see in the sights by running. Who is we? I have no idea how this – Who is we in?

We is me, myself, and I. i refer to my it's the royal we and uh and and and you you will have that freedom except for one day of the road trip where you will not i just am confused on how there is like i haven't seen this itinerary yet but i don't know how it's so scheduled that uh we know that we're not going to be able to eat at certain periods like looking at the itinerary will explain the itinerary we had we yeah so i've been to that i've been to that trip at link and the main page just shows you thumbnails of the cities and i just assumed that if you click on that, that shows you your flight and your hotel and that's it. That was an assumption on my part. That's not how this works. We're going to now, dear listener, look at the trippet in Connors. We're not looking at the

trippet. We're not, we're not, actually we can look at the trippet, but we got to switch. Oh, while Bryce is opening this up, I assume he's going to share a screen because I'm not also opening it up because I'm here on my laptops. What are the topics, potential technical topics or non-technical topics for the day? Are we going to talk about the RustConf drama? I assume you know about that. You're not looking at all this? Yeah, yeah. We can maybe talk about that.

So here's you arriving. Then here's me arriving. Then there's the hotel. Then that's picking out the rental car. Then we leave here. Then we drive from here to here. Then we do stuff here. Then we drive from here to here.

Then we drive from here to here. Oh, my God. Then we arrive here. We have to here. Then we drive from here to here. Oh, my God. Then we arrive here. We have dinner here. Then that next day is the day that things get a little complicated. So, Bryce, do you know where you fall on the neurodiversity spectrum? Just have you taken any tests? I don't know.

We just – we don't know? I do not. We're both probably neurodiverse, you know, somehow. I just haven't taken any tests. But I've never – wow. This is – he's got it. He's got every single root plant. Yes.

Hey, I gave you three options for the hotels for two nights that were carefully researched with lots of information just as I would give my girlfriend and you did something very similar to what she would do which is you were like too much information whatever I trust you make the decisions and so then I was like alright fine I'm just gonna do

whatever I want and Connor's gonna live with it and then later there is regret. If you don't want to have regret later, you should read up the, uh, you should follow what's going on. Because we have a

very fixed schedule that day. Anyways, uh, our itinerary, I've basically just taken what our friend Gaspar has suggested and run with it. He is Slovenian. See, the problem on this day is that he suggested we do three things. And I looked at all of them and they're all pretty good.

But the first thing, we really have to get there at 10 a.m. And then the second thing, we really got to get there at 10 a.m and then the second thing we really got to get there by 2 p.m and that really just doesn't give us a lot of a lot of leeway oh you're gonna need to bring some cold weather like bring bring like a jacket and some cold weather stuff because bro going in some case i'm already in europe oh i'm already in europe did you bring did you bring some cold weather things? No. Okay, well then you're going to be cold when we go to this cave in this mercury mine.

I'm kidding, of course. I have a spare sweater and jacket because I'm an experienced traveler. I just got new luggage. Oh my god, I'm so excited about my new luggage. It's amazing. All right. Happy for you. We're switching topics now to something that our listeners care about. Yeah.

Let's talk about the rest conf thing. You've got thoughts. So give people a 10 second recap. My main thought is that if. We can't get your thoughts before you recap because there's some people that don't know what we're talking about so so rust conf uh invited gene heed um to uh to do a keynote and then um aka the phd on twitter in case you don't you don't know him by his name there were some internal politics and they decided that they were going to try to downgrade his keynote

to a regular talk because they didn't like the content of his talk. And it went as predictably badly as you might imagine. I just got to say, if you're going to try to pull that shit, maybe don't try to pull that shit maybe don't try to pull it with Gene Heed um yeah is it Gene Heed or John Heed uh it's John Heed

I thought it was John Heed I just uh I'm bad at pronouncing names but anyways he um he of course uh saw right through this and did the uh the only thing that I think a reasonable person could do, which is that he pulled out of the conference and he publicly posted about his experience there. And on top of that, JT, who they've been a guest on, CPP cast. Oh, I really don't care about the other Rust people here or what they've done.

All right. You heard it here first, folks. Well, I mean... Bryce doesn't care about the other Rust folks. That they did and controls should have been put in place long ago to prevent this sort of thing to happen. So my level of, my level, my level of caring about Rust organizers, um, uh, at the moment is very, very minimal because I'm

fairly, fairly pissed about this. Um, me being a former conference organizer, this is, uh, uh, I feel his pain at this, and it's a really shitty thing to do. Yeah. And it's just a little bit unbelievable to me that they would try to pull this with him. I think it's unbelievable. As someone who has also been the program chair and been responsible for inviting keynotes, I don't see how you could even begin to think about like revoking a keynote invite.

Like it is maybe one thing if you couldn't think of all of your keynote speakers and someone who already submitted a talk, you asked them to promote if it was okay to promote their talk to a keynote, and then something happens. Like, I still think that is still completely, like, unacceptable. But, like, there'd be something, there'd be more of an argument to, like, oh, this person that we said that we made an invite to earlier could actually make it. But, like, if you're inviting someone who had no intention of going to your conference, modular, like, all of the context around John Hiedman Ede and, you know, his work on Rust and whatever, his experience with C++ and C, I just like, I don't even know how you get, like, they, like, I've read all this stuff and, you know, read all the blogs and the

Twitters and whatnot. And I just am like, if I am the conference organizer or program chair, it is, I would just be like, no, you know how awkward that is to go to someone and be like, Hey, I know we really wanted you. And, uh, we've invited you and agreed to pay all your expenses, but, uh, we've changed our minds. Like, it's just so, I don't know. How do you even begin to think about doing that? Let alone actually execute on that? It just blows my mind. Well, it's – that's pretty shitty. I mean, you know, my – the general policy at the conferences that I've been involved in organizing with keynotes is you invite the person, not the topic, and you invite the person to keynote, and then they sort of get to talk about whatever they want to talk about that's sort of the point of the keynote you don't you don't get to have a

ton of editorial control over that so um so yeah yeah i think that is that's the with cpp north with the first year that was when i was c that was when i was program chair, I think. Basically, all four. Well, so, I mean, we invited Chandler, obviously, from Google, and we knew he was going to be giving a talk about Carbon. But for the other three, we basically invited them and said, you're free to, like, we didn't even have titles from most of them except for a couple weeks out. And I remember having discussions with the program committee or not the program committee with the chair of the, with the conference board. And they were saying, should we ask for titles so that we can start promoting their talks earlier?

And I basically was just like, I understand the reason for that. But the answer is no, because a lot of them haven't. They're still thinking about what they're going to talk about. And I don't want to force them into a box where they have to decide two months out. Their names should be enough to like bring buzz to our conference. And if we get their talk title like three days out, that's when we make the announcement. Because ideally, the keynote speakers that you're inviting are like you know you're inviting them for a reason right so like if you're inviting sean or kate or whoever it is like i'm happy with whatever

they're talking about like i'm gonna go to their talk regardless right like that's why they're keynote speakers so yeah i mean uh the the um the rust community needs to get their shit together i mean one of the things that seemed quite problematic about this whole situation is that rust has sort of been in this has had this interim leadership structure for like i think more than a year now because the previous leadership structure blew up after some part of it resigned. Yeah. Yeah. So do better, Rust people. Do better.

I'm not sure how much you've heard, too, about, like, I don't really know the ins and outs, but there's the Rust Foundation, and then because of the drama with some mod team resigning or core team resigning, people set up the Rust project, so now they have, like, two competing entities. And on top of that i'm not sure if you heard about the trademark yes i did hear about that fiasco where like they're you're not allowed to use rust in the name of like domains or even in package names on like cargo or crates.io and so because like you know it's it's a lot more, there's a bunch of videos online of people talking about it.

And there's been a lot of back and forth. I've only followed like, you know, X percent of it. But because of this, some folks out there forked the Rust repo and they're calling their new language Crablang. and i just think that's hilarious that like a top 20 top top 20 arguably like soon to be top 10 language in the world is upsetting their community so much or like certain entities associated with rust because obviously there's the rust language and then there's you know the foundation and now there's the rust project and all of these things are not one in the same but because of these leadership folks uh making certain decisions that are upsetting people, and from what I know, there's only one implementation of...

I mean, I guess GCC started, they announced that they were going to be building a Rust compiler. But up until then, there's only really the one implementation. And so people have decided to fork it. And I mean, I don't, I would guess that this is just going to be kind of like a reminder that, hey, your community is upset, do better. And once they start to do better, they'll probably abandon Crab Lane. Cause I've never heard of, I mean, there's Crystal, which is a re-implementation of Rust or not Rust, Ruby to be more C-like.

And I'm not sure if that was a fork, but I've never actually heard of people forking an open source language, not to do anything drastically different, but just, I think they're literally, their description is 100% Rust with 0% of the leadership garbage or something like that. Yeah. I mean, some people need to resign. I know I heard that some people have already resigned, but my sense is that more people probably need to resign. Well, so the individual I mentioned, JT, who is Jason Turner's cousin, former co-host of CPPcast, they resigned not because they did anything wrong. They resigned because they were so upset that this had happened. And they were originally one of the two people that nominated Jean-Huid to be a keynote speaker. And then they held some internal vote in the

I can't remember if it was foundation or project, but some group of people voted and the vote passed. And then in between then and like, you know, Jean-Huid being invited, some other people without any vote decided to like reverse that. And so JT was so upset that I think they resigned from that role. And I think effective immediately when they posted their tweet, every other Rust role that they held because... I mean, my inclination here is that probably some of the conference organizers need to take a step back as well because the problem here isn't so much that this happened, it's that this probably isn't the first time that it happened. And so the pattern of behavior is more troubling than anything else,

which is something that I think Jane Heade points out in his, in his post, that, you know, this isn't the first time that it's happened. It's just the first time that somebody spoke up about it. And so that, yeah, at least my experience with conferences is that there's always more shit happening under the surface um and so it's probably time for some for some new for some new leadership there and that's just generally a good idea that you shouldn't have people in leadership for too long it's always good to rotate and this is an excellent opportunity for some some of the people who are currently organizing that conference um uh to to take a step back.

And it doesn't like, like, like I read, I read some things with some of the conference organizers where they, they were very apologetic. They, you know, they'd sort of been pressured by the, these other Rust peop, these Rust leadership people and that they're non-technical, that the people who are organized the conference are conference are not like the Rust leadership people, that their expertise is conference organizing and that they're not like Rust contributors and that they're sort of removed from a lot of like the Rust technical and political aspects. aspects, but, but even so, um, they probably need to resign because they, um, uh, they, they enabled this to happen. Um, they've probably enabled other things to happen in the past. Um, they may not even realize exactly what they've enabled to happen in the past, but,

um, this is, uh, this is indication of, of, uh, deeper rot under the surface. And when you have black mold in your apartment, you just got to tear everything down and completely refurbish it. So this can be an opportunity for RustConf and the Rust language to do better. But that will require some new leadership. Yep. People can come check out Circle too. Yes. If you don't like Rust and you're scared of C++.

But Circle is C++. I mean, that's your motto. It's Sean's motto. I'm just accurately conveying it. I mean, Circle's, you know, like we said, it's the Charmander. Or no, Charizard. It's the Charizard of C's the Charmander. Or no, Charizard. It's the Charizard of C++ of Charmander.

That sentence did not go great for you. Listen, I got confused because I don't know the Pokemons. I really don't know what I'm going to do if they can't fix these glasses. I'm afraid to tell my girlfriend because she has identified that I am a little bit of a klutz. And she's going to, and I know, I know she's going to make fun of me for this. So I'm just going to be like, hey babe, I just decided to go get new glasses today. No reason at all. Anything else? We got a few minutes left before

we wrap this up. So I'm thinking about doing some interviews at Lambda Days 2023 coming up on June 5th and 6th in Krakow, Poland. We've got Jose Valim who's speaking there, Simon Peyton Jones,

and a bunch of other folks that probably have less famous names than them. For those of you that don't know, Simon Peyton Jones is one of the fathers of Haskell. Did you see my tweet? Wrote a... No, I haven't been on Twitter in like probably 24 hours. Dude, go look at my like latest tweet.

It's on topic. Go look at my latest tweet. It's on topic. Go look at my latest tweet. It's on topic. All right. While I'm bringing that up, Jose Valim is the creator of the Elixir language, which is some people will get upset by this, but the most common description of it is Ruby plus Erlang.

Oh, actually, I did see this. This was from a couple of days ago. And Bryce will put a link actually, I did see this. This was from a couple days ago. And Bryce will put a link in the show notes to this. It is a photo of Bryce with what looks like two ice creams in front of a sign that says Haskell. We love that. Clearly, I didn't love it that much because I didn't heart it or read it. Dude, you're killing my engagement. Should I heart it like, clearly I didn't love it that much cause I didn't heart it or read it. You're killing my engagement.

Should I heart it now, folks? I mean, you're listening to this two days later. Yeah. You better heart it. We're gonna, you know,

go check the show notes, hit the link and see if I hearted it or not. I've got two days to, to make up my decision. And yes. So I'm thinking you're not going to be there for that yeah i'm thinking doing that so i think we're gonna we'll have a couple weeks and then you're also not going to be at c++ italy i was thinking about doing some interviews there as well so then i think maybe

the next time we're going to record is when we when we meet up like let's check the schedule actually and we meet up on the 17th so yeah well the next time we record is gonna be live on the road we're not we're not doing it live are we or well yeah i mean i was just typing up the pod but it's definitely not going to be like we could whoa whoa wait wait wait wait wait we could do a live episode no we can't i don't have my actual podcast mike i've got my interview mike anyways it's going to be too complicated to do it live if we want to do something live we can just turn on like i don't know is there a Twitter live or something like that? Twitter spaces, yeah. But yes, if you are, next time we record, not the next episode you hear, but the next time we'll record, we're going to be live. Not live, not live, but together on the road, road trip. And we're probably going to record, I don't know, we'll have to record at least two or three episodes.

So you'll have three weeks of content. We're going to record a lot because we're going to be driving a lot this is gonna turn into a philosophy a philosophical podcast and we're gonna we're gonna play we're gonna play road trip games it's gonna be so much fun there's gonna be very limited sleep oh and we we are so the last day uh we're following gasper's itinerary but the last last day... Which I have not looked at. I just let Bryce look at it. This is a mistake because you may have... I've been super busy because I was at KXCon.

I've been super busy. What are you talking about? No, I've been super busy. I was in Montauk. Where were you? I don't even know where I was. Connecticut, New York. KXCon.

I know we had a whole episode linking the show notes on ArrayCast, but it was absolutely fire. Best conference I've ever been to. Excuse me. Excuse me. You've been to C++ Now, a conference that I organized, which is the best conference you've ever been to. C++ Now 2019 was, up until KXCon 2023, the best conference I've ever been to. It is now the second best. And, yeah been to. It is now the second best. And, yeah, no, it's still the second best.

I'm sorry, CPP North. CPP North is way up there. But having it hosted in Aspen at that little conference center and also just, like, meeting all these people, like Ben Dean, et cetera, for the first time, it's hard to compete with that. So, yeah, number two now is C++ Now 2019. Number one, KXCon 2023. What can I say?

All right. Well, I got to go get new glasses. All right, folks. If you're in, if you're going to be at Lambda Day, although no one probably that's going to be at Lambda Days actually listens to this podcast yet because they're all academics and functional programmers. And that is not our audience, I don't think. But if you're going to be there at the conference, come say hi.

If you want to be on the pod, I'll have the mic on me at all times or like 80% of the time. And if you're going to be at C++ Italy, I'll also be there. Come say hi. I think it's a free conference. No, I don't think. I think it's a free conference. No, I don't think I know it's a free conference. So if you're in Italy, Rome, Italy, go sign up. I'm not sure if there's a limit to how many people can come, but

maybe it's sold out if that's the case. Why is it a free? Anyways. Alright. Okay. It's a free conference because that's the way it is. Alright, folks. Bryce has got to go fix his glasses. Will he get them in time hashtag lens crafters uh you know you're getting a free advertisement here lens crafters so you better deliver all right all right i'll see you later all right well well uh the next time we chat could be in sia or Vienna. But you didn't answer my question whether you can go without lunch

and whether you can go without a day of exercise. I mean, we can just buy a protein bar and then eat it in the car, correct? Be sure to check the show notes either in your podcast app or at ADSPthepodcast.com for links to any of the topics that we mentioned in today's episode, as well as a link to a GitHub discussion where you can leave any thoughts, comments, or questions. Thanks for links to any of the topics that we mentioned in today's episode, as well as a link to a GitHub discussion where you can leave any thoughts, comments, or questions. Thanks for listening. We hope you enjoyed and have a great day.