361–370 of 764 posts
As someone who used Python for more than a decade, a few months ago when I saw PEP 572 and that Guido liked it I knew that it would be by far the most controversial one ever. And I was very concerned that there was no outside community involvement. This is one where there should have been a lot of publicity around, and the community should have been asked (on r/python, r/programming, HN, ...) It's sad to see this, bu…
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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.
When I first started getting into programming (was not a CS major in college) everybody said to start learning Python first. I started digging in and a lot of concepts were easy to grasp and I learned quite a bit until I started doing front-end work and I stopped working with it. This year, my buddy who got me into it originally, suggested I look at django and I've been having fun with that in the past few months. Ma…
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> Python 3 breakage and async turned out to be prescient, fantastic decisions. Async maybe. Python 3 breakage? Did you forgot the /s tag?
No, the bad decision was treating bytes and strings interchangeably in the first place. 99% of the hardest to fix breakage was due to that, and it was the right call to pay that price all at once.
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…
Does being more empathetic when dealing with contributors and their suggestions extract a greater price on one's emotional state, compared to the more brash approach Linus has?
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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…
>because over the long term the market is going to dictate where Python goes and how it grow The market didn't give the world any language nearly as readable and approachable for non-programmers.
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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…
> 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. That's the ruby solution. I like the ruby API here. When ruby introduced it in 1.9, it did cause similar upgrade pain, since you weren't used to having your strings tagged with an encoding, and suddenly they all kin…
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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.
> 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
For the record, here is a study on male chimpanzees:
https://today.duke.edu/2016/10/ChimpanzeeDominance
but the information I provided is generally true for all apes and is accepted amongst biologists. Males tend to challenge higher ranking males. Maybe it's inflammatory but it's true, and it's relevant to the discussion at hand.
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That's a good read. I feel like the "customer is always right" mentality does quite a bit of harm to OSS support. Also reminds me of that dev (who I can't seem to search up) who had their email printed as part of a open-source software license in a car manual and would get ridiculous email from people who had car trouble.
An interesting debate: Are _users_ of FOSS "customers" ?