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“I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”

mail.python.org

101–110 of 764 posts

Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”

#101
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the very point of a bdfl : it assumes he knows better than others. Debating is for insight and cortesy, not mandatory.

But the B is for Benevolent. When a huge part of the community is against, does that B still stands?

This is what happens when the B and the D collide: you renounce to the FL.

Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”

#102
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was controversial syntax, inline assignment-as-expression. There's always a tension between "keep it simple stupid" and "let's make it better", especially when a large user demographic of Python are non-professional-programmers. 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…

> Python 3 breakage and async turned out to be prescient, fantastic decisions. Async maybe. Python 3 breakage? Did you forgot the /s tag?

This is a particularly ill-chosen thread to deliberately try to re-flame this flamewar. Most threads are.

Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”

#103

I've begged GitHub to institute forms of government for repos. For X action to happen, Y percent of the pool of people in the Z list need to approve it. Membership of the Z list is granted when W percent of the T pool approve it. Modifying the rules of government of this repo can only happen when L percent of the R pool approve it. And on and on... I could imagine a city or state government actually having its laws e…

Why Github? It's like begging your electrical company to institute rules for how multi-tenant building is governed. Github is just a (admittedly major) infrastructure provider, they are not and should not be in business of enforcing governance in open-source communities, which have very diverse governance models and it's great.

Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This is going to cause us MONTHS or fixing code for no real benefit since this behavior change is arbitrary and seemingly, was made for no reason" Yeah, tough. Fix your code That's the attitude some maintainers need in cutting unreasonable requests.

It's hilarious because it's literally a one-liner that Rasmus provided for him.

It's more hilarious because his response to that (basically, "this is tax software so there will be a lot of QA when we make that change") is at least sort of legitimate, but only because his accounting software evidently only works due to undefined corner cases in the underlying platform, and that's just ... wow.

Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”

#105
post #15
post #5

> 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

I'm sure 'endosquid.com' is currently being by hammered by people wanting to find out who was so rude and unreasonable.

Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that having strong opinions on how others should be developing software is how communities become toxic like this. "Shooting yourself in the foot is your fault for not using a linter that detects accidental misuse of assignment!"

> I think that having strong opinions on how others should be developing software is how communities become toxic like this. Depends on what you think the answer to "is programming an art or a science" is. People who build bridges are absolutely subject to "strong opinions" on how to build bridges. I am of the opinion that shipping software to others when under a contract without using all the facilities available to…

Programming languages are not just used for shipping software to others when under a contract. Specially Python, which is often used as a teaching language.

Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”

#108

Even though I write python only if it’s going to be like 200 loc tops, it’s insane how gracefully the language has aged. It came out in 91, thus predating for example Java. Fun fact, I believe the very first google scraper was written in it. At the same time I can’t wait for the next language to replace it.

People often don't realize this. We hear a lot that python is moving too fast or too slow. To say that disregard the delicate balance the language had to dance on for 20 years. It's crazy.

Agree but it’s closer to 30.

Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”

#109
Now this is a very dangerous situation, looking how perl5 was handled after Larry wall left them and stepped over to perl6.

Constant infighting of the core devs, useless communication on the mailing list, not a single worthwhile feature being implemented in 15 years, even if perl6 and Larry designed tons of them suitable for perl5, total destruction of the syntax and the core. The better counterexample was perl6 with stricter processes and some capable devs remaining, but still it's another minefield.

Good luck, tons of work to do. python 3 could get 10x faster and catch up to php7 or javascript, types could get properly integrated but I don't see it coming. Usually you have to expect the worst.

Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”

#110
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His email made it pretty clear he doesn’t care how things move forward as it’s now up to the community to decide.

Yes, it is clear as of now. I expect if a chunk of his life's work looked like it was going to go off the rails he may want to reconsider.

At the end of the day, he's not actually a dictator. He's just a contributor with a lot of influence, borne out of respect, and that will remain true regardless of any formal or informal position.
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