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

mail.python.org

181–190 of 764 posts

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

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe we'll try something like a triumvirate? As best I can tell there are basically three areas where Python is dominant: web, data science, and academia. A single leader for each of those spheres could form a council where BDFL-level decisions could be made by fiat. Each community could then form whatever organization they felt necessary to choose who to send to the triumvirate. As as check on the power of the triu…

This sounds familiar:)

Hey - I'm from the US. We have a long tradition of stealing organizational ideas from the Romans.

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

#182
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 not the outrage, it's the entitlement. People have always been outraged, the major difference I've seen is the rampant sense of entitlement. I'm not sure if it's a result of bad parenting or something else, but it's slowly becoming a major issue for the entirety of the human race.

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

#183
post #150
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technology cannot solve social problems

Wasn't it nice that you could reply to this comment over the web rather than physically going to the commenter and telling them what you thought? Boy, this technology sure gave a helpful assist to the social problem of communication.

OP wants code to legislate trust problems within a small, closed group, however no amount of code can ever solve trust problems within a small, closed group.

No amount of code thrown at people mismanaging their relationship with other people will ever help people more effectively manage their relationship with those people -- it just creates artificial obstacles that further exacerbate or obscure the problem.

There is simply no combination or refinement of the logic OP proposed that would ever be perfectly sufficient to avert the need for human judgement in their scenario.

What if 51% of the project simultaneously reveal themselves to be alt-right fanatics who want to take the work in a new, fundamentally evil direction, ideologically aberrant to OP? Oh that's easy - OP can just step in with his admin privileges and disable their access. And that just underscores the point -- the original voting logic was a facade, and the original trust problem remained. The presence of that logic failed to solve any problem, the reality was always a true power structure that differed from the imaginary codified structure.

Perhaps one alternative would be for OP to give up admin rights entirely - but only a fool would believe a bunch of codified rules spread across a couple of software functions could ever perfectly mediate the complexities of a community of people in every possible scenario.

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

#184

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.

Wasn't the first Google scraper written in Java? I saw an old Usenet post by Page from about 1997 asking about user agents in Java. Perhaps that was the second scraper.

> Perhaps that was the second scraper.

I believe that is the case yes. However correct me if m wrong.

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

#185
I believe a big part of Python's success is owed to Guido. However I don't think this is a good move. It's not very likely, but not impossible that this will even kill Python.

Doesn't he have any people he trusts in the inner circle of Python development? Would've been much better to have power slowly and uncommented slip into their hands. A process that could have been started years ago.

Feels a little like this: https://imgur.com/gallery/IYYmtqL

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

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Python 3 breakage and async turned out to be prescient, fantastic decisions. The jury is still out on the Python 3 decision, to be honest. Heck, Python 2 is still officially supported until 2020. Python 3 adoption is increasing, but the instability and breakage that it introduced caused a lot of knock-on effects throughout the Python community that held it back and hindered its adoption and mindshare. It'll take a…

I'll probably never switch for personal use. The print statement change is intolerable to me. It would have cost them nothing to just leave the old syntax in. It's supposed to be a quick and convenient scripting language and they're actively working to make it more verbose and less convenient. I also still don't like not being able to use "string" objects as dumb byte containers, like I do with an IRC bot that doesn'…

Try Ruby.

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

#189

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)

Damn dude... I'm sick and tired of writing stuff like m = f( ) if m: # do stuff with m Trivial as it may be, I for one welcome this.

Yep, and common for regular expressions. I’d alwayed liked the simplicity of Perl’s “if ($x =~ /.../) {“ and in Python you had to create the match object before you could test it. Assignment expressions should work nicely there.

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

#190
post #42
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's a good read. I feel like the "customer is always right" mentality does quite a bit of harm to OSS support. 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.

> "customer is always right" mentality does quite a bit of harm to OSS support.

It goes both ways. All too often people promote their new library on HN and Reddit, wait until a bunch of people are using it as a dependency, and then abandon it without even telling anyone whether or not it’s abandoned.

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