Thank you for your creativity, support, and stewardship Guido. You left a permanent mark on the programming community!
“I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”
301–310 of 764 posts
Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not using toy libraries for production systems is a lesson every young developer learns early on in their career.
Fortunately every young developer is also schooled extensively in telling toy libraries apart from serious ones.
And why isn't the young developer being mentored by someone more senior before introducing a new dependency into a business critical system?
Why is what amounts to a clear project management failure the problem of some open source developer who has published their personal pet project?
If dependencies aren't reviewed before being used, how does such organization handle software license compliance (whether OSS or proprietary), for example?
A clear cut case of trying to shift blame for own failings onto an unpaid volunteer that has helped to save the commercial developer time and money, IMO.
Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”
#303Background ("PEP 572 and decision-making in Python"): https://lwn.net/Articles/757713/
> 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.
What do you do if you really do intend the assignment?
(Assume for the sake of argument it’s some more reasonable example like "if (x = re_match(foo, bar)) {...}")
Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”
#304> 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 :-(
What I think would fix this, is better developer metrics and statistics. If every post to the python-dev list was automatically tagged with some sort of metric for that persons contributions to the project, it would go a long way to identifying, and triaging, the most violent vitriol.
Something like code contributions, amount of churn, speed of implementation, level of correctness, etc. Trouble is, I don't really see any quick "just insert batteries" method of adding such metrics to an open-source programming community - perhaps someone knows of a great system of reports for measuring developer productivity through a repo or something? I guess it would also have to accommodate dev-ops and marketing efforts by developers, too. Hmm .. maybe this is a startup idea in the making ..
Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
There is none in the language, and no proposal has gain much traction on python idea.
Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not using toy libraries for production systems is a lesson every young developer learns early on in their career.
In what parallel universe are you and how do I find the next wormhole to get there? :)
Well, that people don't do such things is not really the fault (nor problem) of the developer of that toy library, IMO.
Nobody else but you alone can ensure that your project is managed and developed properly.
Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is representative democracy the best system for managing a repo? Will there also be an option for pure democracy? Can I fork your socialist utopia and form an authoritarian dictatorship? I don’t see why this system would ever be beneficial to a real world government. We already have checks and balances, if GitHub did it all who decides how GitHub works? What’s the benefit?
> Why is representative democracy the best system for managing a repo? The most obvious reason (to me) is that it's sort of preposterous to think that all votes are equal. I've never even used Python. Should my vote be worth the same as Guido's when it comes to some technical decision? This is a problem in representative democracies as well, of course, but you've a little more protection. There's also the issue of pr…
> it's sort of preposterous to think that all votes are equal.
Sorry if this wasn't clear, but I think there should be different classes of users, with different powers.
No, your vote should not have the same power as someone who has carefully maintained Python for years.
But if there are nine peers, maybe they would like a bit of automation to help them
1) triage bugs
2) vote on actions
3) take those actions automatically based on the result of voting
> It's just impractical to have everybody vote directly on every single decision.
Different parts of code could have different protections.
Want to update the docs? Go for it! If we hate your changes, we'll just revert them.
Want to change the implementation of memcpy? Uh, you're going to get lots of reviews.
> government
How should a city government keep track of its artifacts? The documents it produces that have the authority of their office? Revisions to those documents? Approval over those revisions?
I'm saying technology might make their jobs simpler.
Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”
#308Earlier 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 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…
Reminds me of attending a conference and being in a workshop with a member of TC39, the Ecmascript standards committee. I was sitting next to this individual but didn't know who they were. I made the mistake of complaining about modern JS and version splitting. Fortunately, I didn't say anything too harsh but I definitely would have held my tongue if I knew who they were.
Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”
#309Reading 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…
I wouldn't assume that all the conversation you are seeing is all the conversation.
Re: “I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”
#310All these discussions on minor but convenient changes remind me the (famous?) quote: “When art critics get together they talk about content, style, trend and meaning, but that when painters get together they talk about where can you get the best turpentine.”
It’s sad to see how critics get in the way of an artist who just needs low-level things to be fckng done in a safe-enough way.