4 years ago by chalst
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...
4 years ago by rektide
another random mention, Dave was also the main driver of EcmaScript Modules.
4 years ago by nindalf
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.
4 years ago by bhaak
> 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?
4 years ago by brson
Having so many students involved in Rust was huge. Definitely the most rewarding thing about working on Rust was seeing students get involved, grow, then turn that experience into a career, while seeding the industry with Rust talent.
4 years ago by bhaak
Yes, but it goes both ways. As a student, I was always thrilled to see bits of future technology today.
I am still sad that some of the things I've seen or have taken part in didn't materialize and haven't taken a hold in the present.
The students you had were certainly as happy as being with you as you were having them. :-)
4 years ago by yitchelle
It is a double edge sword. No doubt if the students are motivated and dedicated, they could build the next metaphoric rocket ship. Also they also runs the risk of causing the project to off course and failed.
It sounds like the leadership of Dave was key to getting the team to focus and to delivery high quality results.
4 years ago by camehere3saydis
The converse is also true: students are relatively less fettered by today's "best practices", less constrained by non-academical pursuits, and thus would be more capable of dreaming up a better paradigm for the future.
4 years ago by ndesaulniers
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.
4 years ago by flakiness
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.
4 years ago by jxf
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.
4 years ago by galangalalgol
Have you ever helped a firm use rust on airgapped or nexus ptoxies developer networks? The nexus module appears abandoned, and the documentation on running an offline crates.io mirror is very lacking.
4 years ago by xpe
This seems like a non-sequitor and off topic. There are plenty of better places to give this feedback.
4 years ago by galangalalgol
I think maybe my question was taken differently than I meant it. I was legitimately asking if the gp had/could help with such a task.
4 years ago by jrochkind1
> 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).
4 years ago by hardwaregeek
He also worked on Yarn. Yehuda Katz has probably the most experience of anyone on dependency management
4 years ago by jrochkind1
I haven't heard much from him lately not sure what he's up to.
I'd love to see an interview with him on his experiences with dependency management. What did he learn? What things in earlier attempts did he change in later attempts (from bundler to cargo to yarn)? What does he think he got rightest? What mistakes does he think he made? What mistakes does he think other people are still making? What features of a language or platform faciliate or challenge good dependency management? etc etc etc.
In general, I think there isn't much "learning from prior art" in our field that crosses language/platform boundaries. Katz being personally driving the implementing popular dependency management solutions on three different langauges/platforms was one way to actually learn from cross-language experience! I think in dependency management in particular, there are still a lot of lessons people are learning on their own not realizing another language/platform already learned some painful lessons on it... or maybe differences in langauges/platform mean some things aren't transferable...
4 years ago by whoisburbansky
The name Katz set off bells in my head while I was reading the article, but it was only until I saw your comment that I realized why. Cool bit of connection-making there!
4 years ago by zozbot234
The OP mentions in passing that Brendan Eich "was solidly on team Rust" prior to leaving Mozilla, but adds no further details to that intriguing statement. Wouldn't that make Eich the Most Unrecognized Contributor? I don't think his name would be on any commit repo, after all.
4 years ago by theobeers
Hereās one of the Eich commits in the prehistory repo (which is fun to browse):
https://github.com/graydon/rust-prehistory/commit/8952f420ae...
4 years ago by ealexhudson
I understood that point as relating more to management than technical contribution - that the support of people like Eich was imperative to keep the project funded, and as key supporters left the project became more susceptible to cancellation.
4 years ago by BrendanEich
Thanks for digging this up. Honestly I was doing more for SpiderMonkey than for Rust at code level, but at exec sponsor level, it was me and only me. HTH
4 years ago by kevingadd
Having sat next to / worked with a lot of the rust core people (and Eich) I think while his support was important, that doesn't make him more important/pivotal than people like Dave Herman
4 years ago by BrendanEich
Itās cool to erase me, no problem. Inconvenient facts: I hired Dave, as well as (not as hiring manager but by influence) Graydon. Also Iām cofounder of Mozilla Research and C-level advocate for grad student internships. Iām not taking more credit than them, I want less! But donāt erase sr. management or give anyone else at that level undue credit. It was a team effort, but while there is no āIā in team, there is no budget without C level sponsor.
4 years ago by goto11
Thanks for championing Rust!
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