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Comment by bsder | Hacker News Reader

Expending resources on making Rust an Arduino-level community or more useful to embedded would PROVABLY extend Rust.

So, which one is a better use of scarce time and resources?

Rust the language is making me happier and happier.

Rust the community sometimes makes my eyes roll. I'll need to borrow the millennial "<shrug> Whatever ..." for the proper response to this.

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> So, which one is a better use of scarce time and resources?

This is a false dilemma. Work on that stuff is ongoing regardless of this initiative.

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.

As I said, "<shrug> Whatevs ..."

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.

In this case, the mentors for these projects are also the ones making some of the most significant technical contributions to Rust.

Once in a great while, unicorns are found.I

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