321–330 of 764 posts
> 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 :-(
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…
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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 factor…
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> 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)) {...}")
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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
OMG there are some real gems in that thread. > Escalate? Oh how I wish I had someone to escalate to. - rasmus@php.net > After carefully reviewing this bug report with our board of directors on 4chan, we have come to the conclusion that your "rusty C skills" should be enough to fix the issue. I would therefore like to remind you that rasmus@php.net is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasmus_lerdorf
ahahaha
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…
What are they supposed to do? Python is bigger than GvR. A pretty big chunk of the tech industry depends on it. We were probably long past the point where a "BDFL" was healthy --- not because of any moral issue, but because over the long term the market is going to dictate where Python goes and how it grows, and people should stop kidding themselves that it might be otherwise. I don't think it's at all unseemly that…
Also, an apology for the way this turned out would be seemly.
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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.
Or did you forget the /s...
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…
...there isn't even a single person who stops the clock to evaluate what went wrong... This is perfectly consistent with 99% of the management behavior I've witnessed for years in the enterprise. We understand that we live in a world of cause and effect, but almost everyone is so busy poking at the effect that there's no energy left to discover and treat the cause. It's a shame that so many of us workers continue to…
- What was fun 3 years ago isn't anymore
- That feature that was useful to your customers is no longer serving purposes
- It was about new feature, and now it's about maintaining compatibility
- ...
There is no real cause to "treat", you just need to adapt to the new environment you are facing.
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> Python has been successful, IMHO, because Guido has made several brave, controversial calls. Python 3 breakage and async turned out to be prescient, fantastic decisions. A lot of companies are choosing new languages over porting python from 2 to 3.
Name one.
It is sad but needs to happen with every BDFL, I really like the tone of the email and I am sure the python core devs would figure out something. :) Finally, Guido if you are reading this, thanks for everything you have done for the language and especially the community behind it. I partly owe loving what I do to you. Hope taking this break would help you be happier.