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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”

#511

Post by dragandj »

mgkimsal wrote: post #502
nickthemagicman wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think theres absolutely zero implicit contract that implies that open source software maintainers owe ANYone ANYthing at ANYtime. That's the reason it's open source because everyone can fix it, all an open source maintainer owes you is a P.R. review. Therefore if an open source project maintainer is giving you their time and patience then you better be extra polite and grateful to them. If Ben and Jerrys left a bun…

> because everyone can fix it Nope, not everyone can. And not everyone using it can fix it. And certainly not everyone can fix something to the standards that maintainers might demand. > Therefore if an open source project maintainer is giving you their time and patience then you better be extra polite and grateful to them. If I'm bothering to try to help them with their project, they owe as much 'politeness' and 'gr…

They might (morally) owe you this if they used your contributions. Otherwise, they owe you a (voluntary) politeness and gratitude that any human owes to any other human, but nothing more.

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

#512

Post by mkl »

alexchamberlain wrote: post #444
CrI0gen wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Oh I hope not; I much prefer the much more regular release schedule of Python (though since I went from C++ to Python a few years ago, I understand C++'s development speed has picked up somewhat).

New versions of C++ are released every 3 years, very systematically. It's much more regular than Python. Did you mean "frequent"? Python's sporadic releases are a bit more frequent.

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

#513

Post by logicallee »

holografix wrote: post #367
logicallee wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Isn’t this what always happens though? A remarkle person or small group of people creates something unique and of value. As this thing is adopted by more and more common, unremarkable folk (like me) a market and great demand is created and power over the thing and its creators is established. This power voices opinions and suggestions which in aggregate are a reflection of all the commoditised stuff that already exis…

You repeat that "The thing evolves to follow the demands of the market power" but that doesn't make it true. You can probably think of counterexamples, likely a dozen off of the top of your head.

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

#514

Post by comesee »

sctb wrote: post #443
comesee wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe anything I said was flamebait. I could have provided evidence if it was asked for, but I was shut down and assumed malicious before I had a chance. 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…

> Males tend to challenge higher ranking males. You're making an astoundingly general claim and chimpanzees are not going to back it up. I understand that you might disagree, but there are community standards of discourse here that are not being met and we need you to work on that if you're going to comment.

I didn't have time to dig up more studies but I certainly could if I was paid to. My claim is true and all research on this topic has overwhelmingly confirmed my claim on male group behavior in apes, humans included.

In any case I've acted in good faith to contribute positively to the discourse. I haven't antagonized anyone and I've provided relevant new information that might shine new light on the discussion at hand. If anyone isn't meeting the standards of civil discourse, it's you and whoever flagged my comment. You'd think people on HN would be curious about new ideas. Instead all potential positive discourse is shut down due to a single individual's subjective judgment of what is inflammatory, despite it being scientific consensus. It's clear this isn't a space for civil discourse amongst reasonable people.

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

#515

Post by justinator »

ci5er wrote: post #505
kk__ wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are paying for python. You pay for any software product you use by not using an alternative. OSS maintainers deserve respect but at a certain point they have turned their hobby in to their career, complete with clients and marketing. If you are willing to trust an open source project for your livelihood than the maintainer also has an obligation to respect that.

In a previous life I threw some tarballs w/ a buildable OpenGL clone and separately a buildable Renderman "clone" onto an FTP server and published the location. Some people downloaded it, built it and used it. Even added to it, where they liked. Most people were like you. I never share code any more.

Well, do you use open source code?

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

#516

Post by ci5er »

justinator wrote: post #515
ci5er wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a previous life I threw some tarballs w/ a buildable OpenGL clone and separately a buildable Renderman "clone" onto an FTP server and published the location. Some people downloaded it, built it and used it. Even added to it, where they liked. Most people were like you. I never share code any more.

Well, do you use open source code?

I use gcc on Open Solaris, so, yes. I'm not an ass to the maintainers, God save their souls.

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

#517

Post by lovich »

nickthemagicman wrote: post #480
dcosson wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what you're saying is true in the case of someone just throwing up some code they wrote online without any plan of supporting or developing it further. But once you call it an open-source project, and you have docs and a roadmap and an issues page and stuff, you're making an implicit contract with people who use it that it will do a reasonable job of solving the problem it claims to solve. The user is choosin…

I think theres absolutely zero implicit contract that implies that open source software maintainers owe ANYone ANYthing at ANYtime. That's the reason it's open source because everyone can fix it, all an open source maintainer owes you is a P.R. review. Therefore if an open source project maintainer is giving you their time and patience then you better be extra polite and grateful to them. If Ben and Jerrys left a bun…

That's not true in every case. For instance you need to keep pools fenced in, in most location as they are considered an attractive nuisance and you are liable if children jump into them and drown

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

#518

Post by the-dude »

shakna wrote: post #497
TooBrokeToBeg wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still puzzled to why would a compiler allow assignment in an explicit conditional (outside of loop syntax). It's like a baked-in blindspot that most people just want to ignore for some reason. Some languages actually guard against this well enough (eg Kotlin) and say "don't". Even with guards in place, it's not all that complicated to work around in the edge cases where you might want to do it.

It's handy in C for guarding parts of the language, as you often have to check return values anyway. if(malloc(10000 * sizeof foo) == NULL) { // Error processing } // No need for an else branch here.

Missing assingment.

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

#519

Post by zbentley »

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 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.

Completely tangential, but the density of negatives in that sentence was nothing short of majestic.

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

#520

Post by OmarIsmail »

randomsearch wrote: post #459

Excluding the 2/3 debacle, Guido has overseen an incredible progression in Python. It has become a contemporary lingua franca for coding, and the concept of a “pythonic” approach has been hugely influential. I’m disappointed that he broke Eric Raymond’s rule: “When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.” The email sounds bitter, which is tremendously sad, and…

My guess for lack of successor is that he doesn't want to burden someone else. It's probably one of those things like being a head of state where you don't really know what it's like until you've done it yourself. So people that want to be Python maintainer do so because they don't know what they're asking for.
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