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

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

#341

Post by justinator »

ScottBurson wrote: post #243
justinator wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was on the side of the person giving the - I think fairly legit., bug until I came to, "tax software in php" and then I realized there's nothing really black and white in this world.

Did you catch the part about "it makes you lose faith in the product"? ROFL

I caught the part about, "we have unitialized variables being passed everywhere which should be numbers" and that code, well, smells.

I think the PHP team changing the return value of a function without putting anything in a changelog is a Very Bad Idea and a dev. should be pretty upset about that. Saying that the main dev. is doing this work as a charitable thing is fairly misleading as well.

Buuuuut, I also think passing an unitialized value like that is already a bug in this context given the type of software being created. I'd rather see, "NULL" found wherever than know that it was magically changed to 0 (like they would prefer). I know the dev. said that this is just a formatting thing, but I'll wager they're using formatted numbers for some sort of calculation (inadvertently or not).

Whatever is going on, I hope there was a huge code review and a massive QA effort ( which I also doubt happened), because this is a textbook example of tech debt and the loan shark has come a-knockin'.

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

#342

Post by Keyframe »

jessaustin wrote: post #207
krylon wrote: post #75

I haven't used Python in many years, but it was the first programming language I really could say I loved. Everything was was either completely in tune with my intuition or well-documented. I had a lot of fun with Python, and I learned a lot about programming by (ab)using it. I am very grateful to Guido van Rossum and the work he has done, and I wish him all the best for his future.

I totally agree with this. In 1999 I had only used C and shell (well lisp a little bit in college), and python was such a breath of fresh air...

Even though I am hardwired to C and 'thinking like a machine would/prefers', python was probably the first and only language I didn't feel like it was a programming language at all. Always when I write something in it, it's always 'huh, and that's it? I'm... done?'. Sure, it's equal part due to language and 'batteries', but neither would happen without GvR and awesome community that built around his project and him. Python, to me, is like lisp without parens and with libraries - the future we were promised. Only thing I, personally, can't do is write large(er/ish) codebases with it. I tend to get lost, but that's probably due to my C-like brain. In any case, thanks for everything!

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

#343

Post by patejam »

fit2rule wrote: post #293
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 -…

The indentation should be almost the same as any other language. Unless you have an aversion to consistent code-style.

Python whitespace was only annoying for me years ago when it still had trouble handling tabs and spaces in the same file, and you would run into literally invisible bugs. I haven't run into that in a long time, though.

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

#344

Post by realcr »

Guido, thanks for all your work on Python. It made a huge impact on my life. I have been writing python for the last 12 years and enjoyed every moment. For many years Python was the best way for me to translate my ideas into a working program, and it made a major effect on the way I think. I wish you great luck on all your future endeavors!

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

#345

Post by sametmax »

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…

Since there is no metrics for that, your entire post, much like a lot of any part of the language design process, is very opinionated.

It's why it's hard.

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

#346

Post by owaislone »

rthomas6 wrote: post #299
bluecalm wrote: post #161

Earlier 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?

A dictionary of string: functions I guess? Don't think there is a decent one

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

#347

Post by castis »

comesee wrote: post #319
fit2rule wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I would guess women do it as well, but the study I read on this topic only found it was true for men. I don't care if people disagree or dislike what I'm saying, it's true nonetheless. People harm themselves by not listening.

> it's true nonetheless

[citation needed]

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

#348

Post by oliwarner »

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…

I don't read it like that at all.

There's certainly a friendly nod to the CoC and an invitation for people not willing to adhere to it to leave —and I think that alone would help chill things out— but it's a sustained level of often-thankless hard work. Especially if you have a day job where they're pushing for more and more performance.

This missive is about helping the project move on, not himself. Bollocking the people who have made things hard isn't a productive next step. It's not what's required now; the core devs need to work out how decisions are made.

This is that prompt.

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

#349

Post by jessaustin »

tialaramex wrote: post #263
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…

Implicitly converting strings into bytes or vice versa means now all your APIs grow an exception "Invalid encoding" / "Can't encode this" / "Can't decode this" / etcetera that you need to deal with. Making people actually do the conversion has the advantage that when writing their string conversion code they might actually do something with the exception beyond maybe logging it and then pressing on anyway. It also gi…

...which is way too much to ask of every single function that takes bytes.

Sorry if I wasn't clear. I meant to suggest that the byte-functions wouldn't know or do anything about encodings. They just work with bytes. It's the other functions, that take the encoding-annotated bytes (or optionally a "pure" unicode type), that would care about encodings.

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

#350

Post by sctb »

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.

> Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.

Inflammatory generalizations with no evidence like this count as flamebait, so please eschew them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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