“I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL” • Hacker News Board

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

#291

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 7:08 PM UTC

ubernostrum wrote: post #262

jessaustin wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dat…

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. Long and bitter experience has shown that people who think they can "simply ignore" the "issue" of encoding actually can't. That mindset is mostly a more polite way of saying "people who assume everything is ASCII all the time, or at most an encoding that always has one…

[deleted]

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

#292

Post by comesee » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 7:08 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #275

Reading that thread is like reading an actual Monty Python plot. Guido van Rossum has given his life for this language and besides the obligatory 'thanks for all the fish' there isn't even a single person who stops the clock to evaluate what went wrong that they pushed out the person that started this all. Instead it's 'kthxbye' and they're already dividing up the cake to see who gets to rule. Not the nicest moment i…

Thanks Jacques, sadly this is human nature. Lower ranking males tend to act in ways that subvert higher ranking males, even if they aren't conscious of it or never admit to it. Benevolent dictators are never for life, it is only the aggressive dictators that persist until death. Authority isn't always nice, but required for a stable organization.

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

#293

Post by fit2rule » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 7:08 PM UTC

theandrewbailey wrote: post #85

Python was my first programming language, ~15 years ago. The bracket- and semicolon-free syntax is beautiful and approachable to this day. Python is my go-to for writing data format conversion scripts. I wrote a random sentence generator in Python 10 years ago that gave me and my friends hours of entertainment. Thanks, Guido, for the good times!

I can never get into Python and end up with as much passion as you. For me, its a very powerful and useful language - no doubt about it.

But the aesthetics of a whitespace language just don't jive with my 30+ years of experience writing code. No matter how many times I try over the past few decades, I just can't get passionate about writing Python code. I know its power, and I totally grok its value to our industry - but for me, Lua is just far more elegant, even if it doesn't ship with all of Pythons' goosebridles. Lua is my go-to scripting language; I only ever use Python if I have to - i.e. its enforced on me by others.

I really do try to get over this personal handicap, often enough, but the moment I have to start thinking about indentation I just lose all the passion and it starts feeling like a drag. What a dilemma, because I know it has been used for many, many great things .. I just wish I could get over my aversion to white-space'ing things all the time. I've tried editor after editor (well, expect the Python-specific things), but it just doesn't click.

Ah well.

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

#294

Post by antpls » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 7:10 PM UTC

protomyth wrote: post #289

antpls wrote: post #250

If 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 cod…

> If 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. There is really nothing in the e-mail that indicates that. I can only imagine the message it would send to recall the PEP. I guess it would confirm his decision in a most callous way.

Some people on Internet are reconsidering a second vote for the Brexit, while that PEP didn't even have a vote at all, given it was a dictatorship so far.

Guido wrote the principles of Python, the principles should outlive his reign. :-)

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

#295

Post by munificent » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 7:11 PM UTC

sjm-lbm wrote: post #15

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 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

I have yet to encounter any user so hostile in my open source projects, thankfully. But when the time arises, the line I have prepared is:

    I'm really sorry you ran into this issue. To make things better,
    I've given you a full refund.

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

#296

Post by Alex3917 » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 7:12 PM UTC

jstarfish wrote: post #208

Alex3917 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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.

Not using toy libraries for production systems is a lesson every young developer learns early on in their career.

If you put something out there and no one uses it then fine. But once it has hundreds of commits and issues and over 1,000 stars on GitHub, then I think you have some responsibility to people using the thing you’ve created -- if you’ve been actively promoting it as something everyone should use.

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

#297

Post by fit2rule » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 7:12 PM UTC

comesee wrote: post #292

jacquesm wrote: post #275

Reading that thread is like reading an actual Monty Python plot. Guido van Rossum has given his life for this language and besides the obligatory 'thanks for all the fish' there isn't even a single person who stops the clock to evaluate what went wrong that they pushed out the person that started this all. Instead it's 'kthxbye' and they're already dividing up the cake to see who gets to rule. Not the nicest moment i…

Thanks Jacques, sadly this is human nature. Lower ranking males tend to act in ways that subvert higher ranking males, even if they aren't conscious of it or never admit to it. Benevolent dictators are never for life, it is only the aggressive dictators that persist until death. Authority isn't always nice, but required for a stable organization.

> Lower ranking males tend to act in ways that subvert higher ranking males

Just want to say: It has nothing to do with sex - women do this also. Please refrain from characterising whats going on with Python right now as being a consequence of some sort of masculinity out of control, because I fear that is a falsehood and does you - and anyone who tries to agree with you - a major disservice.

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

#298

Post by jerf » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 7:12 PM UTC

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.

"No, the bad decision was treating bytes and strings interchangeably in the first place."

Show me the 1995 software that gets this right, and I'll show you proof that time travel is possible, by simply showing you that software right back again.

Abstractly, yes, it's true. Concretely, though, it's not a particularly valid criticism.

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

#299

Post by rthomas6 » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 7:13 PM UTC

bluecalm wrote: post #161

sametmax wrote: post #93

It's going to be very interesting to see if things like: - pattern matching - inline exception catching - path inclusion in the built in - more functional tooling - lazy keywors That were BDFL-blocked, will go back to be debated in the mailing list in the next months. And if yes, will the community stands by its root or create a new era ? The consequences of which we will only really see in 10 years. Guido as done an…

I think he made a right call blocking all of those. There are Pythonic ways to do all of those already and the mantra there should be one and preferably one way of doing things is important for the philosophy of the language. With PEP 572 it wasn't like that. There wasn't a Pythonic way to do list comprehensions which used the same expensive to evaluate expression two times in it and it was I think the only glaring s…

What's the Pythonic way of pattern matching?

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

#300

Post by tialaramex » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 7:14 PM UTC

icebraining wrote: post #122

tialaramex wrote: post #64

Guido's question gets to the heart of the problem: "So what are you all going to do? Create a democracy? Anarchy? A dictatorship? A federation?" No. None of the above. These are mechanisms which make choices when a choice must be made, even if none of the options is broadly acceptable. An appropriate mechanism for, say, governing a country. Python isn't a country, it's just a programming language, so when there aren'…

Who decides when there's rough consensus or broad acceptance for a change? You have a bunch of people with commit access to the python repository; of course you need some mechanism to decide what goes in. Rough consensus is what you need here. Why?

A rough consensus is trivially observable. Look around. Who's left saying that plan Foo is a bad idea? Just that one guy who is a total crank and thinks Python shouldn't support 64-bit processors? Nobody cares about him. How about people who think plan Foo is a good idea? Basically everybody who talked about it other than the crank: OK, that's rough consensus.

If you have situations where your "bunch of people with commit access" aren't sure if there's consensus then you don't have a consensus.

As to why you need it: Because unlike countries people have a real choice. All your language users are volunteers. (No "Seasteading" and "Freemen on the land" are not real choices). Not only can they freely choose another language instead of Python, they can fork Python and go make their own instead, or maintain the current code frozen in perpetuity.

Now, if there really is a 50:50 split between people who must have feature X and people who'll leave if feature X is added to Python, nothing you can do will solve that. So it's wrong to try to design your structures for that problem. More often there is a third way, and consensus helps you to be sure you found the third way.