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

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551–560 of 764 posts

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

#551

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…

https://github.com/evantahler/Dont-be-a-Jerk: The open source license for reasonable free software

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

#552

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…

Why did you take his food analogy literally? This post contributed nothing to the conversation in any way.

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

#553

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…

Maybe I'm just getting older, but it seems as though online behavior is getting more hostile generally.

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

#554

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…

I wouldn't call 2->3 a debacle. It brought me along in the end, and I was a huge refusenik.

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

#555

Python was my first programming language, ~15 years ago. The bracket- and semicolon-free syntax is beautiful and approachable to this day. Python is my go-to for writing data format conversion scripts. I wrote a random sentence generator in Python 10 years ago that gave me and my friends hours of entertainment. Thanks, Guido, for the good times!

I can never get into Python and end up with as much passion as you. For me, its a very powerful and useful language - no doubt about it. But the aesthetics of a whitespace language just don't jive with my 30+ years of experience writing code. No matter how many times I try over the past few decades, I just can't get passionate about writing Python code. I know its power, and I totally grok its value to our industry -…

I found Python's indentation style more appealing after working with Clojure for a while. Python is a bit like lisp without the parentheses. In fact you can Clojurify Python with Hy (http://hylang.org) which solves both the indentation problem and the crippled lambdas problem.

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

#556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your analogy you're citing a business. Then if you open source something you wrote, are you claiming you are a business? No matter how un/business-like the open source claim may be: has any money changed ownership between the parties in the course of the person writing and maintaining software vs the person using that software? If no business transaction has been formalized then why should either party be liable?…

IANAL but here are a few things to consider. Every person has a duty of care to minimize the possibility of harm to others. In some professions the standard is higher and may be codified into statute and/or bylaws of their professional association e.g. medical and legal professions. What this means is that, for example, in certain jurisdictions a doctor is bound by his Hippocratic oath and has to render medical assis…

Most (all?) open source licenses have a clause disclaiming any implied warranty or fitness for a purpose.

The example you cite of a doctor being required to provide emergency medical care I don’t think is quite accurate. In fact, doctors are often not covered by “Good Samaritan” laws and can be held liable if they do stop to help someone and something goes wrong. A layperson would not have that type of legal exposure. Medical treatment issues are complex and I can’t see how they are related to open source software.

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

#557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even though I am hardwired to C and 'thinking like a machine would/prefers', python was probably the first and only language I didn't feel like it was a programming language at all. Always when I write something in it, it's always 'huh, and that's it? I'm... done?'. Sure, it's equal part due to language and 'batteries', but neither would happen without GvR and awesome community that built around his project and him.…

how is python like lisp?

See Hy - a lisp written in Python (http://hylang.org).

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

#558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the final syntax := surrounded by parenthesis?

Yes

If the PEP that's published is final, then it only requires parens in certain context to make things clearer, like on the right side of the assignment statement.

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

#559
post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Perhaps that was the second scraper. I believe that is the case yes. However correct me if m wrong.

Yes, Larry Page’s first crawler was in Java, and Scott Hassan rewrote it in Python. From https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/07/valley-of-genius-exc... : > Scott Hassan: In the fall of ’95, for some reason, I started hanging out with Larry in his office. . . . At the time, Larry was trying to download a hundred pages simultaneously. And I was fixing some of the bugs that he was having with Java itself, and this went…

32,000 pages simultaneously - in 1995? Async has only recently been added to Python, no?

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

#560
post #226
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…

How much momentum was lost in the transition though? I know that with the pain of 3 at the time a lot of people started looking at languages like Go or even Scala.

Python currently still 4th at https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ . As the most popular scripting language on there by some margin, I'd say they're still doing pretty well.
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