> 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.

EDIT: See earlier edit.

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?

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".

Data wise: According to the latest Stack Overflow survey, Rust is the language that women are the least interested in.

Any thoughts on why?

  Row	WantWorkLanguage	responses	perc_female	 
  1	R	2477	11.87%	 
  2	Ruby	3743	11.03%	 
  3	Java	9409	8.42%	 
  4	Python	11878	8.22%	 
  5	SQL	10646	7.81%	 
  6	Scala	2972	7.64%	 
  7	JS	15451	7.37%	 
  8	Swift	4282	7.36%	 
  9	PHP	5039	7.22%	 
  10	C#	9640	6.21%	 
  11	C++	7178	5.20%	 
  12	Go	5500	4.87%	 
  13	C	4536	4.83%	 
  14	TypeScr	5435	4.51%	 
  15	Haskell	2208	4.35%	 
  16	Rust	2604	3.38%

  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

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.

Improving the experience on Windows might increase reach as well. Reading this thread, there appear to be some issues: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13974238

Specifically, openssl dependencies, more win32 bindings, and better official docs on how to get it working.

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.

Embedded ... embedded ... embedded.

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

"We have a team of Rust community leaders to pair you with. This group isn’t particularly diverse; this is where the Rust community is right now. "

That's where it's been since the beginning. All the politics, Coraline's Code of Conduct, moderation, talk of "inclusiveness," and so on with "social justice" advocates in or leading some teams. You'd think the teams themselves would be diverse as heck with the community following. Yet, those in control from the beginning up to now are mostly young, white males on almost every team in the pictures.

https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/team.html

Reminds me a bit of the Huffington Post pic on Twitter showing a bunch of mostly white women running a company whose writers talk lots about how companies should be inclusive and/or diverse without actually practicing it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/facepalm/comments/4kn6ms/huffington...

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.

I am really not interested in your current rant.

I care for a well-thought post, which I hope you are capable of.

I could not care less about what you think is or is not relevant to you.

I don't even know what identity politics is supposed to be.

> geekfeminism.org

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

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