The Mozilla-backed programming language Rust has made great improvements over the last couple of years, but the team wants to take it even further. One of the team’s goals for this year was to reduce the language’s learning curve and expand its community of developers. To do so, Rust is embarking on a new experiment to make the language more inclusive, easy to use, and impactful.
“We believe Rust has potential as an enabling technology, empowering a people who would not traditionally do system programming to take it on with confidence. 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,” Carol Nichols, a Rust developer, wrote in a post.
As part of the experiment, the team will look for developers inside and outside the language’s community to partner with on a variety of issues such as user experience, code browsing tools, adding code lints to the Clippy developer tool, approachability, video tutorials, and Rust web tools. In addition, the team will be open to any outside developer ideas.
This experiment will involve three to five hours of investment per week between August 7 and November 6. For the developers who apply and are chosen to participate, Mozilla will send them to the Rust conference of their choice and cover the flight, hotel and ticket costs as a thank you. The team is especially looking for insights from communities underrepresented in the technology world including women, people of color and non-native English speakers.
“Your pair will give you the context and tools needed to help you make an impact on an important area of Rust. You’ll also have access to a private Slack to chat with the other participants and Rust team members involved in this initiative. We’re planning on highlighting the outcomes of this experiment and recognizing your contributions explicitly; we value these projects and your contributions to them highly!” Nichols wrote.
