>Now that PEP 572 is done, I don't ever want to have to fight so hard for a PEP and find that so many people despise my decisions.
Or you could just not implement horrible changes.
“I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”
241–250 of 764 posts
Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yes, Larry Page’s first crawler was in Java, and Scott Hassan rewrote it in Python.
From https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/07/valley-of-genius-exc...:
> Scott Hassan: In the fall of ’95, for some reason, I started hanging out with Larry in his office. . . . At the time, Larry was trying to download a hundred pages simultaneously. And I was fixing some of the bugs that he was having with Java itself, and this went on for weeks, if not months. And I remember thinking, Wow, this is insane!, because I was spending a lot of time fixing this underlying tool. And so one weekend, I just took all his code, I took his whole entire thing, and threw it all out, and rewrote the thing that he’s been working on for months very quickly—over a weekend—because I was just sick and tired of it. I knew I could get the thing working if I used a language I knew very well, called Python. I wrote it in such a way that it could download 32,000 pages simultaneously. So Larry went from barely downloading a 100, to doing 32,000 [pages] simultaneously on a single machine.
Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I was on the side of the person giving the - I think fairly legit., bug until I came to, "tax software in php" and then I realized there's nothing really black and white in this world.
Did you catch the part about "it makes you lose faith in the product"? ROFL
Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”
#244Earlier 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 19 I was interning at Google and I got into a mild discussion on a mailing list with Rob Pike. When I went back to school the next semester someone was teaching a class on UTF-8 and I thought the name of the creator sounded familiar.
Thank god I don't have access to those emails anymore so I don't have to endure the cringe.
To make myself feel better, I posit that that kind of youthful arrogance is at the origin of many innovations done by youngsters that didn't know better.
Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
If both kids want to eat candy as dinner, is the father blocking that not benevolent because he's outnumbered?
In nearly all cases where parenting is present, children are inferior to their parents in both intelligence and judgement. This analogy does not work in software.
Repeating sametmax above: "That's the very point of a bdfl : it assumes he knows better than others."
Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That's not a social problem being solved, that's a technoogical problem. a social problem of communication would have much more to do with the behaviour of people communicating, and one could argue that the internet has made this worse
The underlying point is that technology facilitates changing the state of social problems (whether those changes count as solutions obviously depends on one's subjective viewpoint on what those problems are).
Now, it may be that you mean that the changes induced by technological solutions never actually affect some imperturbable "core problem" that is what people mean when they talk about "social problems". That would be a counterintuitive use of language but there'd be no sense in me attempting to persuade people to use language differently. Instead, what would be productive would be to identify what core, unchanged problem really does remain.
Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
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....
I see; I agree that proper pattern matching would indeed solve that as well, as e.g. Scala does.
Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”
#248He's finally going to admit that the whole python thing was a terrible, terrible joke, it got completely out of hand, and he can't believe people fell for it.
Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
I've done nothing worth mentioning here, but I have received a couple emails asking detailed questions about things I'd done and forgotten about years ago or looking for early career advice, and I'm more surprised and honored that someone took the time to appreciate my work than anything.
Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”
#250If Guido wasn't himself while writing the PEP572, I ask for a new vote about the PEP572. I vote against it, the PEP572 should not be implemented.
To me, it seems a restricted variant on the specific cases "if" and "while" would be good enough, without generalizing to more cases.
The exemples of assignment with "all()" and "any()" make me sad. Python had only one way of doing things, now it has two.
Reading Python code will be more complicated now than it was 10 years ago for newcomers
Edit : I'm sick of all the downvotes on HN. Everytime we post an opinion against the consensus, it ruins the karma, even if the comment is honest. And of course, I can't downvote people, since people keep downvoting me, I never reach the threshold to vote against any comment. The system is unfair to newcomers.