Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

mail.python.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 764 posts

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

#251

Post by code_duck »

Tenoke wrote: post #32
code_duck wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s journalistic, but is not misleading. “[python-committers] Transfer of power - Guido van Rossum” would be more verbatim, but I think the title is okay.

Sigh I'm not saying it's not okay in this case, I'm saying that I believe this would've been disallowed before because we didn't want it to be up to people's judgement whether it is okay or not.

It’s not an article, and doesn’t have a title, so I don’t know what I’d suggest, personally. We have no idea if the title came from the submitter or a moderator, also.

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

#252

Post by sbjs »

jstimpfle wrote: post #68
jcelerier wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem with the C-style of assignments is that it leads to this classic error: if(x = 0) {...} yeah, if you code on 20 years old compilers with no warnings. GCC 4.1 warns about this (with -Wall) and Clang 3.4 warns about this too, without any warning flag.

Not having a problem in the first place is preferable to fighting it with tools. == vs = is a classic mistake that I'm sure every C programmer has wasted some time on. (I'm just undecided if I prefer dealing with this very problem occasionally, or choosing either of the verbosity of := assignments or the non-orthogonality of = assignment statements plus := assignment expressions.)

A programming language and the tools you use with it are tightly integrated: you're never using a language, you're always using a language via a tool. And if all C compilers you might use have warnings enabled for this buggy expression, then there's no problem.

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

#253

Post by rohan1024 »

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.

Completely agree with you. Heck I realized I have the same entitlement issue after running into 2-3 people who were on higher spectrum of entitlement. I was having issue with their behavior but realized I do the same sometimes. I am trying to balance it out. The sad thing is people are not even aware that they have this issue.

I think social media is responsible for breeding this sense of entitlement among people.

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

#254

Post by tialaramex »

ben509 wrote: post #127
coldtea wrote: post #62

Earlier 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.

I think I mostly agree with you, but it can be unclear to programmers (who are after all the people writing Python code) whether they're dealing with a string, or merely with bytes that happen to look like a string, and this causes hassle.

Until way too recently essentially all Python code couldn't handle basic SSL/TLS certificate validation for Internationalized Domain Names. Once you understand what's going on, this situation is a no brainer: In order to connect to a machine named X, we must have turned X into DNS A-labels that we could look up, and we can treat those as bytes. The certificate must have SAN dnsNames matching its names, and those too are written as A-labels. So we can almost just compare the literal bytes (actually DNS A-labels are "case-insensitive" so we need to handle that, and the asterisk "wild card")

But Python, in its wisdom, defined this API to take a string, and strings, as you observe, aren't bytes. So instead of the above unarguable approach they wasted precious months trying to figure out how best to turn the A-labels from a SAN dnsName into Unicode strings, which isn't even the right problem to solve.

Eventually sanity prevailed: https://bugs.python.org/issue28414

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

#255

Post by RussianCow »

weka wrote: post #232
Cofike wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

I think it depends on the type of person and on the type of job. As an independent contractor, you're more likely to have to at least be reachable while on vacation, due to the nature of the work, whereas a company with full-time employees is likely in a better position to have people go off the grid for a bit. That said, personally, even as a former contractor, I want NOTHING to do with work while I'm on vacation—to me, that's the entire point.

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

#256

Post by jimmaswell »

keymone wrote: post #171
jimmaswell wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

Syntax regularity is infinitely more important than scripting convenience.

Button regularity on your keyboard is infinitely more important than ergonomics too, right? Anything but a grid of equally-sized squares must be wrong by virtue of aesthetics. Spoken language too: let's eliminate all contractions because they reduce regularity. Let's also make all the speed limits in the country equal at 20mph, because regularity is infinitely more important than convenience.

You should be supporting return being made into a function too, right? That would be much more regular.

Reminder that a guideline of python was supposed to be "practicality beats purity" which is in stark contrast to the changes to print and strings. [1] Reminds me of the gradual shift of the message on the wall in Animal Farm from "four legs good, two legs bad" to "four legs good, two legs better."

1: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/

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

#257

Post by olooney »

nas wrote: post #147
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…

> The jury is still out on the Python 3 decision, to be honest. It's not. Python 3 has overtaken 2 and there is no stopping migration to it now. Python 3.7 is a lot better than 2.7. Just on memory use alone, 3.7 is massively better. Sure, there will be some hold outs on 2.7 for a long time. That's fine. Also, this is not the say that migration from 2 to 3 was handled well. It wasn't. Python 3.0 should have had backwa…

It was touch and go for a couple of years there but yeah, Python 3 is now well and truly over the hump.

The Python 3 Readiness Project now lists [341](http://py3readiness.org/) of the 360 most common packages as Python 3 compatible.

Even that's underselling it really. For example it lists BeautifulSoup as not converted, but the link goes to BeautifulSoup 3.2.1. However, BeautifulSoup4 works great on Python 3. And for MySQL there's mysqlclient and several others, and since database packages usually follow PEP 249 pretty closely its very easy to switch. So in reality, rather than 341/360, its more like "everything worth converting has been converted." Or just "everything" for short.

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

#258

Post by pjmlp »

chimeracoder wrote: post #70
jnwatson wrote: post #44

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. 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…

Well, many embedded developers will never move beyond C89 unless forced to do so.

Meanwhile C22 work is ongoing.

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

#259

Post by code_duck »

fpgaminer wrote: post #198
vxNsr wrote: post #72

Earlier 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…

That’s great. In your naïveté, you were unaware not intimidated by his prominent figure or reputation. I’ve found that some very well-known people and companies are more approachable than one might expect, possibly because people usually assume they will be indifferent to personal communication and don’t try to talk to them.

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

#260

Post by undseg »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #204
krylon wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OTOH, way back, when I had a TV receiver card by Hauppage, and a new Linux kernel broke something, I posted a description of my troubles on Usenet, and within 24 hours, the person who had written the Video4Linux subsystem replied asking for more details (which I gladly provided), and a few days later, the bug was fixed. That, I think, was the most awesome "customer support" experience of my life. I did make a point o…

I had the same experience. Suddenly Emacs Gnus reader stopped working, about 11:00 on a Friday morning. I posted the bug and had a reply from Lars Ingebrigtsen with an explanation and a workaround by 13:00. I think it was fixed by the beginning of the following week. My experience of trying to get help from Microsoft on the other hand is, well let's just say not quite so impressive; they kept me on hold for 45 minute…

Back in the days Microsoft would have amazing customer support. And I'm talking about "API customers", many times I've seen them go out of their way to fix third party programs not working correctly by adapting their platform, it was a very efficient process. I guess that doesn't work as well at their current scale, or they care less because they're not building up market share.
Post reply on HN