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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”

#601

Post by nikofeyn »

civilitty wrote: post #598
nikofeyn wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

have you ever tried f#? if you think python is what lisp could be (a little confused by that...see racket...but...), then i am curious what you think about something like f#. it’s like python in a way, in that it has oop and uses indentation and not brackets, but it is so much more. and it’s more regular in its semantics. everything returns a value.

"The future we were promised" sounds like he's talking more about a combination of ergonomics and productivity that were promised by Lisp but it never got there because the community just didn't expand to the same size. Python is so widely used that the combination of adoption and design decisions is in the sweet spot we were "promised" by Lisp advocates. F# could also play that role since it can access the rest of t…

you can program f# fully as an oop language, where i think it is still more approachable than python for that. add in async, first class events, tasks, observables, etc., and you have a very approachable but high ceiling with f#. and the syntax is still cleaner than python.

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

#602

Post by Retra »

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…

>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.

Not at all. If I do all that, maybe I just did it for practice? Maybe I get bored or RSI and quit developing software? Nobody owes you anything, regardless of what they've offered you prior.

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

#604

Post by nikofeyn »

emmelaich wrote: post #566
nikofeyn wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how is python like lisp?

'Basically, Python can be seen as a dialect of Lisp with "traditional" syntax' -- To quote Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google and author of multiple books on AI and Lisp.

norvig is the only one anyone ever quotes for python vs lisp. he is beyond my knowledge, but i just cannot see what he says in this quote. python doesn’t feel like lisp at all when programming in it. the mindset is completely different.

edit: i thought this quote was much more recent. it was from around when he first joined google or even before.

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

#605

Post by jodrellblank »

jcelerier wrote: post #67
Waterluvian wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that having strong opinions on how others should be developing software is how communities become toxic like this. "Shooting yourself in the foot is your fault for not using a linter that detects accidental misuse of assignment!"

> I think that having strong opinions on how others should be developing software is how communities become toxic like this. Depends on what you think the answer to "is programming an art or a science" is. People who build bridges are absolutely subject to "strong opinions" on how to build bridges. I am of the opinion that shipping software to others when under a contract without using all the facilities available to…

I feel like you could have written this https://jjj.blog/2016/08/todays-software-is-terrible/

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

#607

Post by joshuamorton »

idontpost wrote: post #599
joshuamorton wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is more commonly known as destructuring. (in python and javascript at least, as well as a few others iirc) Pattern matching is normally (in functional languages like Scala and Haskell anyway) defined as a way of taking a union type and handling each one safely. It's a sort of functional alternative to polymorphism. That is, polymorphic code class Dog(Animal): def make_noise(self): return "bork bork" class Duck(A…

So basically Clojure protocols? As in, multimethods that dispatch on the type of their first argument?

Except that assuming Animal is a sum type (kind of like an enum), the computer will complain.

So a maybe type (equivalent to an Optional) is simply a sum over just and nothing (the two components). If you fall to handle nothing, the program won't compile.

Animal would work the same way. Add "Cow" as an animal, and your program won't compile until everything sanely handles Cow.

So more like a switch case over a set of options where the compiler prevents you from forgetting any.

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

#608

Post by Retra »

rabidrat wrote: post #410
gerdesj wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're not SOL. You just have to retype or reformat the code. Given that you're trying to learn, you should have started with that step anyhow.

I've been writing Python for years and never had this problem.

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

#609

Post by leoc »

webmaven wrote: post #581
nostrademons wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most open-source licenses explicitly say that the software is provided as-is, and there is no warranty, express or implied, nor any obligation to continue to provide support or for it even to work. https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html The user is indeed choosing to use it over other alt…

> Most open-source licenses explicitly say that the software is provided as-is, and there is no warranty, express or implied, nor any obligation to continue to provide support or for it even to work. Certainly, but notwithstanding those disclaimers, if the project's README or homepage describes it as intended and fit for a particular purpose, the user invests some time into learning to use the code in question based…

Yes. The honestly somewhat dodgy no-warranty clauses in open-source licenses have always been justified on the basis that unpaid volunteers can't afford to be exposed to (potentially very serious) legal liability for their work. It's a bit astonishing that now they're being presented as a supposed reason why OS devs never have any ethical responsiblity to their users (beyond refraining from active malice, presumably?) (And in case it needs saying, no-one is suggesting that devs have an unlimited responsiblity to serve or take shit from users, or that users don't have reciprocal obligations.) By that logic the many sleazy Kickstarters, scam PACs, do-nothing gravy-train charities and the like that manage to stay just this side of the law are also all fine and wonderful.

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

#610

Post by emmelaich »

nikofeyn wrote: post #604
emmelaich wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Basically, Python can be seen as a dialect of Lisp with "traditional" syntax' -- To quote Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google and author of multiple books on AI and Lisp.

norvig is the only one anyone ever quotes for python vs lisp. he is beyond my knowledge, but i just cannot see what he says in this quote. python doesn’t feel like lisp at all when programming in it. the mindset is completely different. edit: i thought this quote was much more recent. it was from around when he first joined google or even before.

That wasn't his motivation for using Python.

His motivation was much like many others -- it's the language that looks closer to pseudocode than any other.

His first attempt at doing the AI book using Java was a failure because it's verbosity and lack of features. Students found the Python version much easier to comprehend than the Lisp one.

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