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

mail.python.org

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

#231

Post by cf498 »

Alex3917 wrote: post #190
Y_Y wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is a fundamental difference between the extreme of stuff like GnuPGP, OpenSSL and other extreme of stuff someone created over the weekend and was nice enough to make available

I dont want to know, how much of core infrastructure is resting on the shoulder of overworked and burned out BDFL. This isnt a ego complex in most cases, but the knowledge that without someone with their commitment working at the project it will crumble.

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

#232

Post by weka »

Cofike wrote: post #176
deckarep wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried reaching software engineers on vacation? “Sorry I’ll be camping on some rock on Mars where I’ll have spotty internet access so....”

Yeah vacation isn't work time

It depends. My experience has been that contractors usually don't mind working on vacation while on a cruise whereas salaried people are like "I'm dead; don't reach me."

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

#233

Post by technologia »

robbrit wrote: post #119
technologia wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to dismiss your point, but outrage on the internet is like a car wreck, its terrible that it happened but everyone on the road still wants to check it out and put their 2 cents in.

Seems like this thread is a few steps away from outrage about outrage :)

lol, if my migraine was still raging on then it probably would have been because of me :P

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

#234

Post by arkadiytehgraet »

bpicolo wrote: post #228
arkadiytehgraet wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny you should mention Kotlin; while I like the language a lot, I believe this particular feature would be of immense help in the following scenario: Imagine you have a sealed class Foo, with `class Bar(x: String) : Foo()` and `Baz() : Foo()`. Now, imagine you have a method, returning an object of type Foo: `fun foo(): Foo` And you want to pattern match on the result of this method: when(foo()) { is Bar -> ... is B…

One option is match statements. Great way to make this sort of inline assignment unnecessary

Could you please elaborate more on what you mean by match statements? Is it an already existing feature of Kotlin?

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

#235

Post by bsg75 »

bla2 wrote: 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 :-(

> this age of constant outrage

And entitlement.

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

#236

Post by bpicolo »

arkadiytehgraet wrote: post #234
bpicolo wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One option is match statements. Great way to make this sort of inline assignment unnecessary

Could you please elaborate more on what you mean by match statements? Is it an already existing feature of Kotlin?

Ah, I guess `when` is literally Kotlin's equivalent of match.

What I'm thinking of here is Rust's match statements, which do give you the ability to make use of those intermediary values by making use of Rust's enum type.

https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/second-edition/ch06-02-match....

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

#237

Post by jandrese »

cuckcuckspruce wrote: post #144
chimeracoder wrote: post #70

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…

Python 3 avoided becoming what Perl 6 has. That alone is a victory.

Is there even a "production ready" version of Perl 6 yet? It has to be the worst example of production hell for a computer language in history. It's the poster boy for the second system effect.

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

#238

Post by zaphar »

sjm-lbm wrote: post #104
ashelmire wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One of the hidden costs when you elect to use a language like PHP in the early 00's is that as they fix the glaring issues in their language and stdlib you will be incurring a continuing maintenance cost.

It's a combination of your choice to pick PHP and their choice to fix the languages warts colliding.

It may even have been a reasonable choice for reasons of time to market, hiring, and other business related factors. But the conflict in this thread highlighted that whoever chose PHP in the beginning did not factor in this hidden cost when he made his choice. The results of that lack of information were predictable.

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

#239

Post by bsg75 »

Y_Y wrote: post #42
sjm-lbm wrote: 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.

An interesting debate: Are _users_ of FOSS "customers" ?

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

#240

Post by wild_preference »

tw04 wrote: post #182
bla2 wrote: 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.

I noticed this over the years on a forum I’ve run for over 10 years. Since ads are pretty much dead for small publishers like me, the forum costs me money. But I run it out of charity.

Nothing sucks the energy out of me more than lurking in my forum and seeing users complain about how little I’ve done for the forum. I don’t want to know how many weekend I’ve spent building features for the forum or arbitrating problems between users.

The thing is that these posts of entitlement are a relatively knew phenomenon on my forum mostly in crescendo over the last four years.

I’m pretty sensitive to it now and it’s easy to spot eveywhere. From people whining that free shit isn’t perfect on HN to gamers complaining that a modder charges for the mod instead of doing it for fun.

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