Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

mail.python.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 764 posts

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

#351

Post by joshuamorton »

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 think a public thread is the right time or place for such a retrospective. Keep in mind Guido's parting words ("Finally. A reminder that the archives of this list are public").

And I'm not sure who would be the right person or people to apologise. A number expressed regret at what happened, but I don't really think the core devs are at fault here.

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

#352

Post by comesee »

tptacek wrote: post #333
jacquesm wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Whatever apology GvR is owed, it's none of my business. The post-BDFL continuity plan is super relevant to me, but I can say with some confidence that GvR does not need me as a witness to whatever psychological remediation he may or may not need for the assignment expression debacle. It's not my place to psychoanalyze him, and he rather clearly didn't ask me to. So again: why, as a professional who interacts with the…

Are you not interested in what caused the leader of a community to step down? Do you not think that that information would be helpful in sustaining the community? This event is not business as usual, it should be considered with great care.

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

#353

Post by rurban »

rurban wrote: post #109

Now this is a very dangerous situation, looking how perl5 was handled after Larry wall left them and stepped over to perl6. Constant infighting of the core devs, useless communication on the mailing list, not a single worthwhile feature being implemented in 15 years, even if perl6 and Larry designed tons of them suitable for perl5, total destruction of the syntax and the core. The better counterexample was perl6 with…

Regarding the endless mailinglist thread problem on this PEP, I can only recommend to use a different PEP tool.

A wiki leads to more structured argumentation, can be re-ordered and edited and doesn't get out of control. Sometimes I also use github issues, because I can update the issues there. But on big issues a wiki page is better.

Such a mailinglist discussion is mostly drama without much content.

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

#354

Post by TheDauthi »

undseg wrote: post #260
kwhitefoot wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the same experience. Suddenly Emacs Gnus reader stopped working, about 11:00 on a Friday morning. I posted the bug and had a reply from Lars Ingebrigtsen with an explanation and a workaround by 13:00. I think it was fixed by the beginning of the following week. My experience of trying to get help from Microsoft on the other hand is, well let's just say not quite so impressive; they kept me on hold for 45 minute…

Back in the days Microsoft would have amazing customer support. And I'm talking about "API customers", many times I've seen them go out of their way to fix third party programs not working correctly by adapting their platform, it was a very efficient process. I guess that doesn't work as well at their current scale, or they care less because they're not building up market share.

They once shipped my company a custom MSVCRT.DLL to fix a crash bug in a third-party application under heavy load. True, it was a bug in the C runtime itself, but they got us a fix for it about a day after we (along with the third party) got in touch with them.

Just a few years later my team had to contact them for a BSOD that kept happening after one of their patches. We were put off for about a week before throwing our hands up on it.

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

#355

Post by tptacek »

comesee wrote: post #352
tptacek wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatever apology GvR is owed, it's none of my business. The post-BDFL continuity plan is super relevant to me, but I can say with some confidence that GvR does not need me as a witness to whatever psychological remediation he may or may not need for the assignment expression debacle. It's not my place to psychoanalyze him, and he rather clearly didn't ask me to. So again: why, as a professional who interacts with the…

Are you not interested in what caused the leader of a community to step down? Do you not think that that information would be helpful in sustaining the community? This event is not business as usual, it should be considered with great care.

Not really? I'm not suggesting that great care shouldn't be taken; I'm suggesting that there's no evidence that it hasn't, and that neither you nor me are particularly important players in the story of what is happening, and that nobody owes us an explanation. Certainly, a concerted effort to prevent GvR from stepping down as BDFL seems silly.

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

#356

Post by rabidrat »

patejam wrote: post #343
fit2rule wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's also basically impossible to cut-and-paste code from a web forum. Was that "else" from the inner or the outer "if"?

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

#357

Post by xg15 »

tptacek wrote: post #320
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…

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…

> but because over the long term the market is going to dictate where Python goes and how it grows

The market gave us the absolute mess that is HTML/CSS/Javascript today, so I'm sincerely hoping the Python community will keep agreeing on some greater design principles instead of leaving everything to market forces and pragmatism.

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

#358

Post by chias »

wild_preference wrote: post #240
tw04 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the outrage, it's the entitlement. People have always been outraged, the major difference I've seen is the rampant sense of entitlement. I'm not sure if it's a result of bad parenting or something else, but it's slowly becoming a major issue for the entirety of the human race.

I noticed this over the years on a forum I’ve run for over 10 years. Since ads are pretty much dead for small publishers like me, the forum costs me money. But I run it out of charity. Nothing sucks the energy out of me more than lurking in my forum and seeing users complain about how little I’ve done for the forum. I don’t want to know how many weekend I’ve spent building features for the forum or arbitrating proble…

I'm in an almost identical situation with an online community that I've built and have continued to work on. Back in the day I could hang out there to relax -- these days it's incredibly draining for me to be around.

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

#359

Post by jondot »

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…

Whats the pythonic way to do dependencies? pip? pipenv? virtualenv? pyproject? And how about Python 2 and 3?

But seriously, I think there's no one way to do things anymore especially if it holds up productivity and effectiveness. Let the pattern matching begin.

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

#360

Post by comesee »

tptacek wrote: post #355
comesee wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you not interested in what caused the leader of a community to step down? Do you not think that that information would be helpful in sustaining the community? This event is not business as usual, it should be considered with great care.

Not really? I'm not suggesting that great care shouldn't be taken; I'm suggesting that there's no evidence that it hasn't, and that neither you nor me are particularly important players in the story of what is happening, and that nobody owes us an explanation. Certainly, a concerted effort to prevent GvR from stepping down as BDFL seems silly.

I'm not implying an effort to prevent GvR from stepping down, but I don't think the lack of public consideration among core devs on why this happened is healthy either.
Post reply on HN