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

mail.python.org

401–410 of 764 posts

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

#401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

Also makes auto formatting very difficult when whitespace indentation doesn't just affect readability but syntax.

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

#402
post #250

If Guido wasn't himself while writing the PEP572, I ask for a new vote about the PEP572. I vote against it, the PEP572 should not be implemented. To me, it seems a restricted variant on the specific cases "if" and "while" would be good enough, without generalizing to more cases. The exemples of assignment with "all()" and "any()" make me sad. Python had only one way of doing things, now it has two. Reading Python cod…

> Everytime we post an opinion against the consensus Downvoting was, long ago, supposed to be used to indicate trolling, incivility, not substantive, etc. Sometime recently, dang and sctb have ruled that downvoting for disagreement is now perfectly acceptable. In any event, I agree it's become a terrible method of hivemind enforcement. Have an upvote.

That is what I thought too. I read HN since so many years. Perfect example of a rating system turning into a bad censorship.

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

#403
post #250

If Guido wasn't himself while writing the PEP572, I ask for a new vote about the PEP572. I vote against it, the PEP572 should not be implemented. To me, it seems a restricted variant on the specific cases "if" and "while" would be good enough, without generalizing to more cases. The exemples of assignment with "all()" and "any()" make me sad. Python had only one way of doing things, now it has two. Reading Python cod…

> Everytime we post an opinion against the consensus Downvoting was, long ago, supposed to be used to indicate trolling, incivility, not substantive, etc. Sometime recently, dang and sctb have ruled that downvoting for disagreement is now perfectly acceptable. In any event, I agree it's become a terrible method of hivemind enforcement. Have an upvote.

> Sometime recently, dang and sctb have ruled that downvoting for disagreement is now perfectly acceptable.

You are wrong about that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

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

#404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's a free product, not a child support obligation. Even if you do walk away, it's open source and can be maintained by anybody interested in stepping up. This is the price of adoption, not guaranteed updates for life from the creator.

But I get where you're coming from. It's even worse on Steam, where developers will actually collect money during the "early access" phase and then walk away once a (closed-source) tech demo is half-complete.

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

#406

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…

You can in fact factor out expressions in list comprehensions, like:

    [foo(y, y) for x in xs for y in [f(x)]]
Is this Pythonic? Perhaps not, but mainly because multiline list comprehensions are frowned on in general. I think people tend to get too dogmatic about that.

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

#407
post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you trust Github to hold your repo, and to implement the mechanics of modifying your repo, but you don't trust them to implement a system of governance over that, then I think you're odd.

If Github screws up any of this, you fork to a different location.

> BTW, there's nothing wrong with small groups of individuals having power over repos

I'm not saying that shouldn't exist.

I'm saying that's inappropriate for some use cases. I'm asking for an optional feature that I would want to use, sometimes.

> Which should not be approached with one-size-fits-all attitude.

Which is why I said that it's a challenge to handle the different use cases appropriately.

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

I'm asking for a feature which makes it less likely that I'll have to abandon a repo for a fork, in some circumstances.

If you don't want the feature, or if you don't trust people who use that feature, you're free to fork.

Why are you going out of your way to shit on my feature request, considering it does you absolutely zero harm?

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

#409
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not an accurate summary of assignment expressions. Assignment expressions perform the assignment and also return the value of the assignment. So you can assign and test a conditional at the same time. It's quite an elegant alternative to some quite verbose repetitive code you would otherwise have to write in some scenarios.

Assignment expressions are also found in languages like C#, and have proven to be of great practical value. f-strings was another Python 3 idea that was pre-dated by an implementation in C# [1] ($-interpolation) and it was a popular idea in that language too. I don't want to proffer an opinion on PEP 572 since I haven't followed the discussions, but these things have been "bench-tested" in other languages and not bee…

Yes, I don't really understand the controversy either. I work with Python a lot in my day job, and I am quite frustrated with how slowly the language moves. For a long time, it seemed like the reason was the Python 2-3 switch, but now we don't have that excuse, and things are still slow. Every little decision seems to get immobilised at the PEP stage.

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

#410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That could be considered a feature. At least you have to read what you have copied and pasted.

That's cute but I hope no one reading this thinks you are being serious. If they do, to wit:

So many webforums strip leading indents from code. It's not like it looks right on the forum, and then gets inserted into your editor wrong. It's often not right on the source side either. So if you're trying to learn an algorithm from the Python code, you're SOL. This has happened to me.

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