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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”

#411

Post by marcosdumay »

fwdpropaganda wrote: post #87
Analemma_ wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(a := b) rather than a = b Naturally people went to the barricades for it, in a classic example of bikeshedding and Wadler's Law (programmers will fight to the death over trivial syntax disagreements and just shrug at profound changes to semantics and architecture)

Damn dude... I'm sick and tired of writing stuff like m = f( ) if m: # do stuff with m Trivial as it may be, I for one welcome this.

Many languages solve that with pattern matching, like in Haskell:

    case f  of
        Nothing -> -- Handles the problem values
        Just m -> -- do stuff with m
This is, honestly, much better than an assignment expression. Side-effect expressions always bring problematic cases.

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

#413

Post by lizmat »

jandrese wrote: post #237
cuckcuckspruce wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python 3 avoided becoming what Perl 6 has. That alone is a victory.

Is there even a "production ready" version of Perl 6 yet? It has to be the worst example of production hell for a computer language in history. It's the poster boy for the second system effect.

There has been a production ready version of Rakudo Perl 6 (https://perl6.org) since Christmas 2015. It has been on a monthly release cycle for years, and a 3-monthly release cycle for Rakudo Star, the "user" distribution (with some bells and whistles added).

Cro (https://cro.services) is a set of libraries for building reactive distributed systems. Comma IDE (https://commaide.com) is an IDE for Perl 6, based on the JetBrains IDEA platform, now in (paid) beta.

If you want to keep up-to-date on Perl 6 development, check out the Perl 6 Weekly (https://p6weekly.wordpress.com).

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

#414

Post by Alex3917 »

jstarfish wrote: post #404
Alex3917 wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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) te…

> This is the price of adoption, not guaranteed updates for life from the creator.

I’m not saying anyone should be obligated to do free work. This issue is that most people don’t feel comfortable publishing a public fork without the blessing of the creator, or at least knowing the creator no longer intends to work on the project in the near future. So you end up with these situations where there are thousands of people running production systems with unmerged security patches because the creator can’t be bothered to spend 30 seconds to write a one sentence reply to an email.

Short of being in a coma, I consider that toxic behavior.

And just to be clear I’m taking about situations where there are lots of open PRs but no signs of life for months or years on end, not situations where the creator just went on vacation for a few weeks.

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

#415

Post by aptwebapps »

jacquesm wrote: post #326
tptacek wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I imagine they already have opinions about what caused him to step down and either don't consider it a real problem for whomever or whatever succeeds him or at least think it best addressed by that person or people. In other words, figure out the leadership structure and let them deal with it.

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

#416

Post by mkesper »

jcelerier wrote: post #270
woah wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thinking that linting and static typing will stop all errors is foolish (although I prefer both, myself). Cargo culting "best practices" is often useless, and is sometimes used as a crutch by developers who are bad at the much more important and much less quantifiable things, like code readability and architectural simplicity. Wanting your pet coding preferences to be enforced by criminal law is a sadomasochistic fan…

> Thinking that linting and static typing will stop all errors is foolish (although I prefer both, myself). Thinking that putting a seatbelt will prevent death in a crash is foolish, and yet they are still mandatory

Here you are very wrong. Look at https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/seatbelts/facts.html#... or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seat_belt

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

#417

Post by joshuamorton »

liveoneggs wrote: post #329
Daishiman wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name one.

Google replacing python with Go?

This also isn't really true. Google is certainly replacing certain things with Go. But its not replacing python with go.

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

#418

Post by CrI0gen »

xg15 wrote: post #357
tptacek wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hopefully it transitions into a similar way that C++ is managed.

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

#419

Post by antt »

kolpa wrote: post #339
jVinc wrote: post #213

All this over a god damn bikeshed that no one will care one way or the other about 6 months after its implemented. He didn't loose faith after the 2->3 transitioner but but a goddamn assignment operator that works just like so many other languages. I mean it was bound to happen at some point, but I am really disheartened that it happened in this way.

Python's original "sales pitch" was that it was a clean and simple language. As years go by and more weird stuff is piled in, it becomes less Pythonic.

I forget which book this was from, but when I was learning python back in 2003 a major selling point was 'you can't make assignments in control structures'. Happy days to a physics undergrad who had seen more if(a=3) in C code than he could shake a stick at.

Sometimes less is more. Python is turning into more is less. It doesn't need to be everything to everyone.

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

#420

Post by vram22 »

adamnemecek wrote: post #31

Even though I write python only if it’s going to be like 200 loc tops, it’s insane how gracefully the language has aged. It came out in 91, thus predating for example Java. Fun fact, I believe the very first google scraper was written in it. At the same time I can’t wait for the next language to replace it.

>Fun fact, I believe the very first google scraper was written in it.

Fun "fact": I need to check my facts, but it could be that the very first Google was written it it, too :)

Checked:

https://www.google.co.in/search?q=what+language+was+google+s...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Search

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google

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