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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”

#381

Post by marcosdumay »

owaislone wrote: post #346
rthomas6 wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the Pythonic way of pattern matching?

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

That's parametrized jumping. Pattern matching is parsing a structure with variables and filling those variables from a single structured value.

Python does that with tuples:

    a, b = b, a
But it just stops there. To be fair, I don't know how much power it would gain by going further either. Never made that question.

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

#382

Post by raverbashing »

jcelerier wrote: post #47
js2 wrote: post #27

Background ("PEP 572 and decision-making in Python"): https://lwn.net/Articles/757713/

> 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.

Warnings in Python are very rare, and only for good reasons

Throwing warnings for "common code" would be uncharacteristic.

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

#383

Post by smsm42 »

VikingCoder wrote: post #267
smsm42 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why Github? It's like begging your electrical company to institute rules for how multi-tenant building is governed. Github is just a (admittedly major) infrastructure provider, they are not and should not be in business of enforcing governance in open-source communities, which have very diverse governance models and it's great.

Because I don't want an individual (or small group of individuals) to have authoritarian power (BDFL) over a repo. It's the governance of the repo that I want encoded. I make a pull request, and it's decided upon by the government system. That needs to be encoded into Github. And yes, "the very diverse governance models" is a challenge. One I think needs to be taken up, eventually. I don't want one jerk to have the a…

> Because I don't want an individual (or small group of individuals) to have authoritarian power (BDFL) over a repo.

And the solution is to trust Github (proudly owned by Microsoft) to be the rule enforcer? Hmm...

BTW, there's nothing wrong with small groups of individuals having power over repos - millions of small software projects are governed that way, with exclusive control of one person or small team of people over them. For the project of Python size and influence, it's not a good idea, but for many others it's fine.

> And yes, "the very diverse governance models" is a challenge. One I think needs to be taken up, eventually.

No, it's not a challenge, that is a natural diversity of life. Which should not be approached with one-size-fits-all attitude.

> I don't want one jerk to have the ability to ruin a repo.

With open source and proper distributed version control, it is not possible anyway.

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

#384

Post by emodendroket »

shams93 wrote: post #330
kamyarg wrote: post #2

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.

Yes thank you Guido! I started working with python back in 1999 working with zope, now we live in a much easier world where you have many options to deploy python applications, my boss wound up rejecting my project but working with python was just as amazing in 99 as it is today its just so much easier you can see all the work and more importantly love that has been put into the language since its inception. Thanks a…

I have really horrible memories of trying to keep a Plone site in prod from my sysadmin days.

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

#385

Post by sevensor »

bluecalm wrote: post #146
js2 wrote: post #27

Background ("PEP 572 and decision-making in Python"): https://lwn.net/Articles/757713/

Well, when he is dealing with arguments as silly as "but we will confuse = with ==) it's not a surprise he is tired and had enough. I just wish he had pushed through C style assignment before retiring. New syntax is ugly and introduces a new operator which basically does the same thing. When I've seen this PEP for the first time I thought he lost his touch after so many fantastic design decisions throughout the years…

My reaction was the opposite -- I didn't know about PEP572, read it immediately after this retirement announcement. My response was, "where has this feature been all these years?" I'm delighted by the addition -- it removes a lot of "loop and a half" ugliness without adding do loops, it simplifies list comprehensions, it lets you remove opportunities to make mistakes, and it doesn't let you put a single-equals assignment inside a conditional as a typo.

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

#386

Post by slics »

It takes someone dedicated to do what you have done for this long. You need the vacation more than anyone else. I wish you had a tip bucket somewhere and I’ll gladly donate for some of your vacation cost, simply a thank you tip for your tireless effort.

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

#387

Post by rhizome »

janoc wrote: post #302
jacquesm wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortunately every young developer is also schooled extensively in telling toy libraries apart from serious ones.

And why isn't the young developer being mentored by someone more senior before introducing a new dependency into a business critical system? Why is what amounts to a clear project management failure the problem of some open source developer who has published their personal pet project? If dependencies aren't reviewed before being used, how does such organization handle software license compliance (whether OSS or prop…

And why isn't the young developer being mentored by someone more senior before introducing a new dependency into a business critical system?

Because they're already the senior. CEO said it shouldn't be that hard, and besides, they only wanted to pay $40K/yr.

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

#388

Post by [deleted] »

robotkdick wrote: post #377

For anyone else wondering what BDFL means: Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL) is a title given to a small number of open-source software development leaders, typically project founders who retain the final say in disputes or arguments within the community. The phrase originated in 1995 with reference to Guido van Rossum, creator of the Python programming language.[1][2] Shortly after van Rossum joined the Corporatio…

[deleted]

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

#389

Post by emodendroket »

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…

> Not the nicest moment in the history of FOSS, I wonder what kind of a mess will ensue when Linus steps down.

It's kind of funny to see someone worrying about sparing Linus Torvalds' feelings.

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

#390

Post by hermitdev »

at-fates-hands wrote: post #203

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…

I learned Python ~14 years ago. I already had decent C, C++ & C# knowledge, plus a handful of assembly languages. I already knew how to program, but was taken aback by how approachable Python was. I can't remember if I started on 2.2 or 2.4, but I basically learned 99% of what I needed to know in the first few days. In the last 14 years, I've written a significant amount of Python, mostly for work (finance/trading). It's no exaggeration to say that my Python apps had billions, even trillions of dollars worth of orders/transactions/contracts flowing through them, and Python was rock solid for me every time.

It's still my scripting language of choice. I'm still more likely to rewrite a Perl script in Python than I am to try and make any significant change to the Perl script. I like the "batteries included" approach, and that the Python devs prefer to add new features via libraries than new obtuse syntax. I think most of the recent syntax changes were well deserved and wouldn't otherwise have been well served by a library (thinks like async, context managers, and going back further generators and the if/else ternary expression).

Also, I'm almost exclusively on Python 3 now. The only real issue I've had is constantly needing to remember how to properly open a CSV file for reading (I really don't know how they let that wart live for so long).

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