Dave Herman’s contributions to Rust

Dave Herman has been a high signal-to-noise contributor to Lambda the Ultimate over the years; if you want to get an idea as to where he is coming from, looking at his contributions there [1], his slightly active blog [2], and on his now pretty much inactive joint blog [3] are good places to start.

[1]: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/user/825/track?sort=desc&orde...

[2]: http://calculist.org/

[3]: https://www.thefeedbackloop.xyz/

I've heard a lot of engineers complain about engineering managers over the years. I've also heard great managers self-deprecatingly say they "don't do any work". I've seen managers feeling bad they weren't productive so they resorted to writing code to feel that they were having impact.

This post is an example of the incredible impact an engineering manager can have without writing a line of code.

I swear I recall being a fly on the wall and just being in awe; early on in my career just listening to Dave Herman, Luke Wagner, and Alon Zakai discussing asm.js which would one day lead to webassembly. It was very early days even for asm.js, but from how they spoke of it and it's potential you could tell it would have huge impact on the industry.

Reading "JavaScript: the first 20 years" [1], Dave Hermans name is popping up here and there as well. His contribution in this case was highlighted in the story of the (failed) ES4. I wonder how these early experience has shaped his thoughts on Rust.

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3386327

> A little appreciated fact: Rust was largely built by students, and many of them interned at Mozilla.

The article doesn't mention it but this is of course a very good long term strategy. Things students learn during their formative years at university will bear fruit once they enter the work force.

How many of those students are now at or about to enter important positions in the industry?

Do you think Java could have become this big if it wasn't teached at so many universities at the entry level?

Having written Racket code myself I was surprised when I saw that Rust had Hygenic macros.

I've never learned how to use macros effectively, but once I've gotten more comfortable in Rust I'd like to give it a good shot. Given Dave's background with Racket and Macros, this feels like a worthwhile endeavor.

On a side note there are a lot of cool language oriented programming stuff that Racket does through it's macro system, and I wonder if it is at all possible to do something like that in Rust

> Hiring Yehuda Katz to design Cargo

I did not realize this; that explains why cargo is so similar to ruby bundler (which Katz also wrote).

I confess I'm pretty ignorant about the history and origins of Rust, and it's not something I tend to investigate deeply for a lot of my tools.

But I derive a great deal of my current livelihood from Rust and helping firms use it well, so thank you, Dave.

If nothing else, maybe I'll be looking more closely at my next tools, and hoping they have their own Daves quietly advocating for their success.