Thank you Guido for creating and shepherding such an amazing language one that has been my go to language for years for its ecosystem and it’s beauty. Seriously thank you so much.
“I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”
191–200 of 764 posts
Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”
#192Earlier 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 has been successful, IMHO, because Guido has made several brave, controversial calls. Python 3 breakage and async turned out to be prescient, fantastic decisions. A lot of companies are choosing new languages over porting python from 2 to 3.
Name one.
Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a particularly ill-chosen thread to deliberately try to re-flame this flamewar. Most threads are.
To be fair, the person stating that Python 3 breakage was a fantastic decision probably should've avoided referring to that as such, as it almost certainly invites disagreement on a controversial topic.
No, that's giving the flamemongers a flamer's veto. It's a perfectly sensible thing to mention when talking about the difficulties of leading the Python project and offering an opinion on how Guido van Rossum handled them. Picking out that one opinion and yelling little more than 'fite me' back at the person is not a perfectly sensible thing.
Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”
#194To Guido, a career's worth of thanks (I doubt I would have had one without Python) and for being encouraging and supportive to a very young dev at a long ago conference - to keep that up over decades means encouragement, mentoring and optimism was bred in your bones. Have a lovely permanent vacation.
To the python community, I hope we can find a successful, democratic way forward.
To myself, public service is a good thing - try harder !
Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”
#195Earlier 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?
B stands for benevolent even in that case. The target of that benevolence is the project. His call should be in the best interest of the project (benevolent), final (dictator), and (tongue in cheek) eternal (for life)
Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”
#196I'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…
You can implement it already with the GitHub API. If you do, please run it on itself.
Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Python 3 breakage and async turned out to be prescient, fantastic decisions. Async maybe. Python 3 breakage? Did you forgot the /s tag?
No, the bad decision was treating bytes and strings interchangeably in the first place. 99% of the hardest to fix breakage was due to that, and it was the right call to pay that price all at once.
The API in 2 is not optimal, but they fixed it the wrong way. As you know, some operations make sense with bytes, and some make sense with character strings. The operations that make sense with character strings would also make sense with bytes when an encoding is specified. Therefore, there should just be a way of annotating bytes with a suggested encoding. Then byte-oriented packages (e.g. those that deal with data sent over an interface like a socket or pipe) could simply ignore the issue of encoding. Whole classes of errors would just disappear for many python coders. Other coders, who do care about encodings and non-ASCII characters, would still get those errors but that would be OK because they would know how to fix those errors.
So yes some breaking change was indicated, but the particular change that was made was the wrong one.
Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”
#198Earlier 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
O_o I wonder how many times I've spoken to someone and didn't realize who it was/how important they were because of the anonymity of the internet.
When I was much younger I started building a ray casting engine. I was having trouble wrapping my brain around how to render the floors so ... I emailed Ken Silverman.
It escapes me now _why_ I emailed him. I certainly had no idea the gravity of who he was (for those also unaware, he is perhaps most famous for creating the Build engine used in games like Duke Nukem 3D). I believe I was under the false assumption at the time that the Build engine was a raycaster (I hadn't played Duke Nukem), and I probably found a personal page of his about the Build engine while trying to solve my problem.
Either way, young me emailed Ken Silverman like it was nothing. He responded! He corrected me about the Build engine, but also proceeded to help describe how to render floors in a raycasting engine.
It still took me awhile more to get the hang of the math, and I believe a few more emails back and forth with him. I feel bad now, knowing now who he was. But I appreciated his help immensely. I think I wrote 3 or 4 more ray casting and tracing engines back then. Some were rudimentary, one was a raycaster but allowed arbitrary 2D level geometry (and even used some tricks to put "holes" in walls to cheat windows and have multiple heights). One was for a code golf competition. And one was _super_ efficient; the math and levels were set up such that 90% of the logic was just binary math rather then having to do the usual multiplications, divisions, and square roots. They're a lot of fun to make and I learned a lot.
Ken, if you ever stumble on this comment, thank you!
Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”
#199Earlier 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
OMG there are some real gems in that thread. > 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
Born in Greenland, that's a first I've seen.
Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”
#200Earlier 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!"
Linter? You mean compiler right? The compiler should be warning for things like this, not relying on 3rd party tools. So, yes, if you're using a custom compiler, you kinda are to blame for shooting yourself in the foot. Just use the official binaries!
Depends on the language. Javascript, for example, would use a linter for this warning.