“I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL” • Hacker News Board

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

#521

Post by maxerickson » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 11:06 PM UTC

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…

You've come to the wrong conclusion, he handed things off to the core developers. It's not like there are 45 million people with commit privileges over there.

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

#522

Post by JetSpiegel » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 11:08 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #225

jnwatson wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was controversial syntax, inline assignment-as-expression. There's always a tension between "keep it simple stupid" and "let's make it better", especially when a large user demographic of Python are non-professional-programmers. Interestingly, C++ is going through the same process, with lots of great ideas being proposed, but the sum total of them being an even more complicated language (on top of what is probably…

> Python 3 breakage and async turned out to be prescient, fantastic decisions. Python 3 implementation was a step in the right direction, but the decision to allow the old language co co-exist with the new one and to break backwards compatibility between the two (for instance 'print') in places where it didn't need to break makes no sense to me. A lot of goodwill got burned with that.

I think this was important. The class of bugs it would have created if it had been compatible with the unicode/ascii split would be hideous.

Fail fast. It's better to break right away than having false senses of security. There is always __future__ too.

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

#523

Post by ranit » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 11:10 PM UTC

dcosson wrote: post #475

TheMagicHorsey wrote: post #427

I don't know if it's just me, but if you read the forums and bug reports related to open source projects, it feels like programmers today are a really entitled lot. The tone that people take when filing bug reports for what is basically free software is reprehensible. People are doing work for FREE to benefit you, and you take a tone with them like you are a prince and they are your royal goblet holders? Who taught t…

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…

So, we insist open-source software developers to keep their "implicit contract", but we (as society) allow companies to buy companies that develop and maintain open-source to close-source it or just close the entire establishment? Without legal consequences.

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

#524

Post by bb88 » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 11:14 PM UTC

sneakermoney wrote: post #479

xg15 wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

"The market" took over after a long period of "design by committee" that had "strong design principles"[1] resulting in something that was both inadequate for what people wanted to do and didn't evolve at a promising pace (likely because of said principles). When the market did take over, the problem was that those poor foundations weren't thrown out completely. You can only do so much by strapping turbines on a came…

So the reality is that the growth of the web far outpaced any sort of design principles that could have been implemented by any committee.

TCP/IP development happened quietly for the most part in the 1960s-70s. There wasn't a lot of pressure, and they had a decent amount of time to get the protocols right. There wasn't an economic demand for Arpanet.

And it wasn't until about 1993/1994 that the web exploded in use and popularity. That was only 4 years after TBL created HTML. That's when you saw the explosion of JS/Java Applets/CSS/Browser Plugins/etc.

In some sense, the same thing is happening in the python world. While python has been around for a while, there were maybe 800 python devs at Pycon 2010. In Pycon 2018 there were 3000ish(?).

I do agree with you that the Python 3 update wasn't done well, I think it is because they didn't predict the language's explosion during the 2010's.

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

#525

Post by pertymcpert » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 11:15 PM UTC

newen wrote: post #430

TheMagicHorsey wrote: post #427

I don't know if it's just me, but if you read the forums and bug reports related to open source projects, it feels like programmers today are a really entitled lot. The tone that people take when filing bug reports for what is basically free software is reprehensible. People are doing work for FREE to benefit you, and you take a tone with them like you are a prince and they are your royal goblet holders? Who taught t…

In the majority of cases, they are getting paid to code it (by some company, organization, etc). And they benefit from the popularity of the the software. So I don't think I need to see myself as a charity case or adopt a please please please attitude with them.

You are a charity case.

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

#526

Post by remind_me_again » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 11:19 PM UTC

skishore wrote: post #501

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…

> If Ben and Jerrys left a bunch of ice cream on the sidewalk and a bunch of people ate it and got sick then there would be zero liability on Ben and Jerrys. Citation? That doesn't seem right, based on my anecdotal knowledge that restaurants take care to throw leftovers into a garbage bin rather than leave them out somewhere where someone could eat them and expose the business to liability. I looked up this claim mys…

I like reading comments, you never know what you'll learn. Guido is taking a break and I learn a bill about food donation.

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

#527

Post by nas » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 11:24 PM UTC

cwyers wrote: post #507

nas wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The jury is still out on the Python 3 decision, to be honest. It's not. Python 3 has overtaken 2 and there is no stopping migration to it now. Python 3.7 is a lot better than 2.7. Just on memory use alone, 3.7 is massively better. Sure, there will be some hold outs on 2.7 for a long time. That's fine. Also, this is not the say that migration from 2 to 3 was handled well. It wasn't. Python 3.0 should have had backwa…

That's not the point of the person you're responding to. They didn't say that the transition didn't happen. They said it's not yet known if it was worth it. All you're saying is that it happened.

I'm saying it happened and Python 3 is the language I want to use. If you don't do Python 3, you either keep the error prone str/unicode string model or you dream up some way to evolve to a better model. Would some mythical version of an evolved Python 2.x be better than what we have? I mean, how to argue against that? I haven't seen anyone propose a workable migration plan. Python 3.7 is better than 2.7.15 and better than 'tauthon'.

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

#528

Post by xg15 » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 11:27 PM UTC

sneakermoney wrote: post #479

xg15 wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

"The market" took over after a long period of "design by committee" that had "strong design principles"[1] resulting in something that was both inadequate for what people wanted to do and didn't evolve at a promising pace (likely because of said principles). When the market did take over, the problem was that those poor foundations weren't thrown out completely. You can only do so much by strapping turbines on a came…

> "The market" took over after a long period of "design by committee" that had "strong design principles"[1]

Yes, but a committee (or a community if that term has too many bad connotations) can at least argue about the design principles and on occasion decide to change them using a well-defined process (e.g. rough consensus or voting).

> When the market did take over, the problem was that those poor foundations weren't thrown out completely.

The original plan of the W3C TAG was to pull the foundations and make a fresh start with XHTML2. The browser vendors objected to that and chose to instead evolve the original HTML into what we have today.

> The other part of the mess is caused by the ever-growing amount of trend-hopping junior developers that want to try out new things...

But that's the point. Those trend-hopping junior developers and their bosses are the market: If you view programming languages as products, those are the early-adopters, one of the generally most sought-after part of the customer base. If you want to be 100% market-driven, you have to listen to them.

> ...because the market rewards stability

The market apparently didn't bother much that HTML is now a "living standard", browser release cycles are measured in weeks and generally a software is considered dead if it doesn't receive any more updates.

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

#529

Post by nas » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 11:30 PM UTC

nopacience wrote: post #426

nopacience wrote: post #422

Guido van Rossum, "the creator of python", created the following page to show he has aged over the years: https://gvanrossum.github.io/pics.html I prefer perl, but thanks for python! Diversity is good always :)

As a big influencer, Guido, "the creator of python", even inspired austin powers character Guido (1995) https://gvanrossum.github.io/images/Guido@200dpi.jpg Austin Powers (1997) https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BYWY1ZTdlZTEtYWRjOS00...

Guido's glasses are much cooler, IMHO.

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

#530

Post by rectangletangle » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 11:31 PM UTC

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.

I'm also really sad to see him go. I sincerely hope Guido enjoys his well earned time off. I'm extremely grateful for the amazing community he has fostered around his excellent language.

Though as an avid Python user (~10 years), this does fill me with concern. Not only for Guido's health, but for the health of the language. Guido leaves awfully big shoes to fill, and I'm hoping the community is up for the challenge.