331–340 of 764 posts
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Fortunately every young developer is also schooled extensively in telling toy libraries apart from serious ones.
Then explain nodejs and MongoDB existing in production systems? Or did you forget the /s...
Yep. It's been a long day after a particularly long week. I will take a break from HN, too much on my mind. Thanks for the reminder.
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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.
I love seeing rapidly graying true comments. Replying in your support, in case you’re not used to it but I guess you are. I think Testosterone is the driver, all people have it, but men have way more—significantly so, IIRC. Cheers
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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…
Some root cause analysis would be nice. Because whatever went wrong that caused GvR to step down isn't solved and the future structure whatever form it will take will most likely not be quite as resilient against this as GvR was. Also, an apology for the way this turned out would be seemly.
So again: why, as a professional who interacts with the Python ecosystem, am I interested in anything more than what is already happening on the thread?
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But the B is for Benevolent. When a huge part of the community is against, does that B still stands?
He gave them a fantastic language for free and shepherded it for years - how much more benevolent does he need to be?
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…
The market didn't give the world any language nearly as readable and approachable for non-programmers.
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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)) {...}")
At least the systems I've seen need a extra (()) around = to disable the warnings and notify the reader that you're not just comparing for equality.
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That a customer of mine started a web project in Python 2 in 2015 after 7 years since the first release of Python 3 means that the Python BDFL and community managed the process horribly.
Could it be that many vendors still ship Python 2 as default for internal reasons (system-related scripts and what not rely on it)? Macs, for example ... So you customer, not knowing any better, used whatever was on the machine already. If that's the case, that's really not the Python's community's fault.
The problem was that after 8 years there were still around libraries and frameworks that worked only with Python 2. That's a huge failure. If developers want to keep using the old stuff it means that the new one is either badly designed or badly managed.
Compare it with Ruby. There were big changes from 1.8 to 1.9 (unicode stuff among the others) and again with the 2.x series. The language mostly maintained backward compatibility and we can still write Ruby on 2.5 with the old 1.8 syntax. Community ported libraries and frameworks, started using the new features and all went well.
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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…
All this over a god damn bikeshed that no one will care one way or the other about 6 months after its implemented. He didn't loose faith after the 2->3 transitioner but but a goddamn assignment operator that works just like so many other languages. I mean it was bound to happen at some point, but I am really disheartened that it happened in this way.
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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.