41–50 of 764 posts
> I don't ever want to have to fight so hard for a PEP and find that so many people despise my decisions. Leading a large open source project must be terrible in this age of constant outrage :-(
It's PHP and not Python, but every time I read something like this from a major open source figure, I always think of this old PHP mailing list thread: https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=50696
Also reminds me of that dev (who I can't seem to search up) who had their email printed as part of a open-source software license in a car manual and would get ridiculous email from people who had car trouble.
I got to say, HN has become much looser with the titles since dang took over. It could be for the better (or not), but I definitely see at least 5 top posts a week with an editorialized title now, compared to a lot less before. Edit: Everyone is saying it is fine. Again I'm not saying it is not, but if it is, can you please update this part of the guidelines: >Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is mis…
> I don't ever want to have to fight so hard for a PEP and find that so many people despise my decisions. Leading a large open source project must be terrible in this age of constant outrage :-(
I'm a little confused though, by his feelings here. Why did he feel the need to "fight so hard for a PEP" if it was so controversial, and everyone was outraged? I do understand people's points about "the age of outrage" and "internet 2018" but still: the PEP wasn't generally accepted as being a fantastic improvement, so why did he feel the need to fight so hard for it?
Interestingly, C++ is going through the same process, with lots of great ideas being proposed, but the sum total of them being an even more complicated language (on top of what is probably the most complicated language already).
Python has been successful, IMHO, because Guido has made several brave, controversial calls. Python 3 breakage and async turned out to be prescient, fantastic decisions.
> I don't ever want to have to fight so hard for a PEP and find that so many people despise my decisions. Leading a large open source project must be terrible in this age of constant outrage :-(
I'm a little confused though, by his feelings here. Why did he feel the need to "fight so hard for a PEP" if it was so controversial, and everyone was outraged? I do understand people's points about "the age of outrage" and "internet 2018" but still: the PEP wasn't generally accepted as being a fantastic improvement, so why did he feel the need to fight so hard for it?
Ultimately, it's up to certain stakeholders to hear arguments and make calls.
> I don't ever want to have to fight so hard for a PEP and find that so many people despise my decisions. Leading a large open source project must be terrible in this age of constant outrage :-(
It's PHP and not Python, but every time I read something like this from a major open source figure, I always think of this old PHP mailing list thread: https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=50696
> Escalate? Oh how I wish I had someone to escalate to. - rasmus@php.net
> After carefully reviewing this bug report with our board of directors on 4chan, we have come to the conclusion that your "rusty C skills" should be enough to fix the issue. I would therefore like to remind you that rasmus@php.net is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasmus_lerdorf
Background ("PEP 572 and decision-making in Python"): https://lwn.net/Articles/757713/
yeah, if you code on 20 years old compilers with no warnings. GCC 4.1 warns about this (with -Wall) and Clang 3.4 warns about this too, without any warning flag.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
(a := b) rather than a = b Naturally people went to the barricades for it, in a classic example of bikeshedding and Wadler's Law (programmers will fight to the death over trivial syntax disagreements and just shrug at profound changes to semantics and architecture)
That's not an accurate summary of assignment expressions. Assignment expressions perform the assignment and also return the value of the assignment. So you can assign and test a conditional at the same time. It's quite an elegant alternative to some quite verbose repetitive code you would otherwise have to write in some scenarios.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
(a := b) rather than a = b Naturally people went to the barricades for it, in a classic example of bikeshedding and Wadler's Law (programmers will fight to the death over trivial syntax disagreements and just shrug at profound changes to semantics and architecture)
That's not an accurate summary of assignment expressions. Assignment expressions perform the assignment and also return the value of the assignment. So you can assign and test a conditional at the same time. It's quite an elegant alternative to some quite verbose repetitive code you would otherwise have to write in some scenarios.
f-strings was another Python 3 idea that was pre-dated by an implementation in C# [1] ($-interpolation) and it was a popular idea in that language too.
I don't want to proffer an opinion on PEP 572 since I haven't followed the discussions, but these things have been "bench-tested" in other languages and not been found wanting, so I do wonder a little bit about the true cause of the controversy.
[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/language-refe...