Ubuntu VP Says: "Stop Writing Python", Wants Devs "All Day Writing Rust"

0:00A Buntu's vice president, John Seeger, spoke at a keynote for Rest Nation UK this last week, a big giant rest conference, a gathering of the rest faithful over in the United Kingdom. And he told the congregational members there that he is telling all a Buntu developers to, quote, stop writing Python. Apparently he's telling them that very sternly and that he wants developers working on a Buntu to be writing rust code all day, right? All day writing rust code a bunch, along with a bunch of other crazy stuff. Let me read you some of the most ridiculous quotes that I found from this particular keynote. We a Buntu announced that we were going to start replacing core system utilities, LS, move, CP, pseudo with rust rewrites and we were just going to do it by default with no apology. We got plenty of headlines. The internet got somewhat

1:01set on fire by the idea that we were going to or by the fact that the rest people were coming for GNU. Yeah, there was a couple of little little digs in there at some unnamed people making headlines about this. Who knows who those were. He continues, the GNU core utilities have been around forever. You know, they've been solid. It's a well-tested code base. It's performant. There's nothing wrong with it. End quote. No, so if you're listening to that quote, maybe wondering well, that sounds like a really good argument for not replacing all the GNU core utilities with rust based rewritten clones from scratch that haven't been tested. They've been around forever. Solid, well-tested code base, performant, nothing wrong with it. It sounds an awful lot like a Buntu's vice president is just simply repeating Lunduke journal talking points. But yet he continues as they're just going to ignore all of that and rewrite it anyway. So to be clear, they have no good

2:08reason to do the rust based rewrites, but they're going to do it quote, what was it by default with no apology and quote. He also continues to say, there will be some people who depend on the kind of esoteric edges of these code bases who might see some breakage end quote. So basically he's saying, yes, everything works now. And of course, we're going to break a bunch of things and a bunch of people are going to see all sorts of new errors because of what we're doing, but we're doing it anyway, and we're not apologizing for it. At least he's at least they're at least they're being open about what they're doing, right? He's not lying about it. He's saying, flat out, yeah, the GNU core utilities, they're I mean, they're they're about as close to perfect as you're going to get. They're well tested. They've been around for decades in many cases. And there's no good reason to dump them, but they're going to do it anyway, and they're not going to apologize for it. I mean, I respect that. I mean, he's he's declaring that yes, the the faith of the Church of Rust supersedes

3:15any engineering need, and they're not going to apologize for that. Oh, okay. But then he started talking about Python, and I thought this was fairly interesting because it was just a throwaway comment. But well, you tell me what you think of this quote, I have asked the Ubuntu desktop team very politely and quite sternly to stop writing Python for the distribution end quote. Now, those of you who've been around since the early days of Ubuntu, Ubuntu was Python. That's that's what they did for better or worse. I mean, there's there's pros and cons with writing a whole bunch of desktop tools and system tools and whatnot and Python, but but Ubuntu really was focused on it. The whole Ubuntu world was very Python centric Python and GTK. That was there. That was their thing. But they're they're saying no, going forward, don't write Python, not just write a little less Python, but stop writing Python altogether. And again, there's

4:20pros and cons there, but he's apparently quite stern about it. He continues, we of course also have been we of course also have to have a hand in the Rust for Linux project. We have a huge kernel team. I think it's about 80 people. Um, and while they are not people who sit all day right now writing Rust, I suspect the future will increasingly look a bit like that. So stop writing Python, spend all day writing Rust. The quote, the opportunities keep coming up for us to get rust into new places. You don't say I appreciate when the followers of the Church of Rust just come out and just are honest about it. They're finding nice new places to shoehorn rust in. They're replacing things that they agree work great are super performant battle tested. And there's no

5:21reason to get rid of them. But we're going to do it anyway. And we're not going to apologize. I do find it funny that he even had a whole slide about headlines with a little little laughy emoji and all that where he took a couple of digs at the the anti rust headlines that a bunch who made because of this, which was a little bit of a dig directed at the London Journal. But, you know, I love it that every time that new news comes out about something going wrong with Rust or a big Linux distribution or a big developer decides to heavily adopt Rust. Even you dive into the comment section, like a good third of the comments are either laughing at because clearly the London Journal is going to cover something about it or mocking the London Journal or just saying, oh, someone better check on London because this company is going to be rewriting some stuff and

6:25rust. It's gotten to a point now where any discussion around coverage of Rust inevitably leads back to the London Journal. I'm not 100% sure how that happened, but it happened and I've fight it amusing enough. Let's see, what else we got here? And they've made a point, he made a point as he was closing out the keynote to declare that they are not finished yet on any, any highlighted not finished, right? And he wants to make it very clear that the process of replacing everything with Rust code is just at the beginning phases. And he talked about a large number of different projects, these scroll up if you see if I can show you some of them here, a number of different projects that they would be moving over to Rust in the very near future, specifically Mir, which that's still around, and Box, the kind of the Android emulation environment, DQ Lite, which is a SQL

7:28kind of compatible system and just a whole bunch of other tools. They've been talking about replacing as many of these things as possible with Rust over the months ahead. And it's fascinating to watch how they're justifying it because they've stopped justifying it. Now they're just saying flat out what they're replacing is great, but they're going to do it anyway. So that's neat, also stop writing Rust. Thank you to the Lunduke General subscribers for allowing me to watch that incredibly boring keynote. You're welcome. Go to Lunduke.com and click on all those links. Those are amazing. They're the best links in the entire world. H refs galore. Thank you to all the Lunduke General Lifetime subscribers. If you want and you're a Lunduke General Lifetime subscriber, you can be added to these amazing walls. That's the first wall, the second wall, the third wall. There's the fourth wall and wall number five will be making its grand appearance any day now. I was supposed to do it last week, but I didn't because I was busy, but we'll get it

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