The “woke” angle was raised later on. JT brought up it up:
“It was JeanHeyd who called Rust out for having no Black representation among Rust conference speakers. Rightly so, as both the Rust organization and the conferences had little to no Black representation.
When I saw an organization that not only could act so coldly to an expert in the field, but also to one who was a vocal critic of Rust's lack of diversity, it was hard not to see the additional context.
Systems have memory and biases. If the people that make up the system don't work to fight against these, they are perpetuated.
As my buddy Aman pointed out, the context that this would have also been the first keynote by a person of color at RustConf should not be lost here.”
Seems to be the case of some influential toxic person(s) in the Rust Project. They can’t even be named apparently. (Yeah, like the He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named in the Harri Potter series.)
Calling the story "eviction dispute" is quite an understatement. They served 4 years jail sentence for sawing huge hole through tenants' living room and forging threatening
letters as if they were coming from tenants.
The story is relevant, because:
1. It was already out there in the public. Skipping it completely would be unprofessional.
2. It gives a possible explanation for low code quality.
3. The developer in question is open about his past.
4. Person who went so far as resort to destruction and deceit in the physical world, could easily cut corner in the code review process:
> Person who went so far as resort to destruction and deceit in the physical world, could easily cut corner in the code review process:
This is a very dangerous delusion. It implies that producing flawed code requires some kind of moral blemish, a flawed character, a bad person. Truly upstanding citizen and high moral character would never submit a buggy code, but one can't expect otherwise from a criminal.
Nothing could be further from the truth. In my decades-long experience reviewing what must be by now megabytes of code, the code quality has absolutely no relationship to the moral character. Best people can produce - and regularly do produce - very flawed code (very much including myself, of course), and even excellent coders can be busy, tired, have temporary slip of attention, be wrong about particular API or language construct, mistaken, suffer from a burnout or a work-life issue... Even at their best, people produce flawed code all the time - that's why we have code reviews in the first place! It's not to weed out "that kind of people" who try to sneak into our pristine cohorts - it's because producing good code is hard, and producing flawless code all the time is nigh impossible to do by a single person. A concerted effort of multiple smart people over time is required to achieve even imperfect, but acceptable quality - and perfection is still an unattainable goal. It's a hard work, and it can't be done alone - nothing to do with character flaws.
And yes, left to their own devices, even the best people are subject to cognitive biases and fallacies - that's why it's impossible to effectively review one's own code and you need peer review. Not because you're suspected in being a criminal or at least a sloppy coder - but because you're human and as such, your best effort will never be perfect, especially not at scales modern code is produced.
> It was already out there in the public. Skipping it completely would be unprofessional.
Nonsense. Nobody expects every article about a person to include their complete biography. People expect including relevant stuff and throwing out irrelevant one. What is unprofessional is brining in irrelevant details to smear the character of a person to prejudice the reader against him from the start (that's why this BS goes first and the substantial part goes later). Instead of trusting the reader to judge on substance, the hack first creates an emotional prejudice which would cloud the mind of the reader and make a pre-formed opinion before the substantial part ever begun.
Yes, the comment was not nice (comment is now dead). However, I've stopped watching the video because the presenter's English accent was not easy on my ear. The problem reminds me about "Founders' Accents" article:
Brendan may not be helming JavaScript anymore. But he was very active during critical standardization period. For example:
2009: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUtsgUrF-ec
2011: https://brendaneich.com/2011/08/my-txjs-talk-twitter-remix/
2012: https://brendaneich.com/2012/10/harmony-of-dreams-come-true/
Also note that Asm.js (2013 precursor to WebAssembly) was developed during his term at Mozilla.