“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”

#611

Post by b0rsuk » Fri, Jul 13, 2018, 4:06 AM UTC

sbjs wrote: post #582

jstimpfle wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most important "program" that reads your source code is probably in your brain. You probably have some "tooling" in their that is on the watch for "if (x = y)" and other patterns, but I'm sure you'd prefer to not have to run it. As another counterexample let me give you "language tooling". For example, write a tool that generates a FFI from $LANGUAGE to C. Is it really so unimportant that $LANGUAGE is clean and s…

> "The most important "program" that reads your source code is probably in your brain." Not if you have a good Integrated Development Environment (or IDE for short)! That's an even better "program" than your brain, because it shows syntax errors and other warnings right next to your code. It will literally put little red squiggly lines right under `if (x = 1)` and show the file as red in your file explorer side-bar,…

You can't assume that every single person will have a good IDE. And you will be reading and maintaining code written by people who don't. In that case I prefer to deal with a language which guarantees no trivial errors.

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

#612

Post by bogomipz » Fri, Jul 13, 2018, 4:08 AM UTC

sneakermoney wrote: post #487

sevensor wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My reaction was the opposite -- I didn't know about PEP572, read it immediately after this retirement announcement. My response was, "where has this feature been all these years?" I'm delighted by the addition -- it removes a lot of "loop and a half" ugliness without adding do loops, it simplifies list comprehensions, it lets you remove opportunities to make mistakes, and it doesn't let you put a single-equals assign…

Same here, I often find myself writing a loop-and-a-half and will on occasion repeat expressions to get around extra lines (if I cared about performance, I wouldn't be writing it in Python). I feel like a lot of the resistance is from people who think this is somehow bad style, because it's associated with a source of bugs in other languages. The same kind of people will argue endlessly against having 'goto' in a lan…

Can you explain what a "loop-and-a-half" is in Python?

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

#613

Post by _1100 » Fri, Jul 13, 2018, 4:13 AM UTC

setgree wrote: post #490

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…

One person who understands and writes extremely well about this dynamic is Eliezer Yudkowsky. From the incomparable Harry potter and the Methods of Rationality : [0] ""I was going to be a hero, once," said Professor Quirrell, still looking upward. "Can you believe that, Miss Granger?" "No." "Thank you again, Miss Granger. It is true nonetheless... I was not naive, Miss Granger, I did not expect the power-holders to a…

I grok. I have neither read this, nor have I read any Harry Potter (much to the chagrin of many of my friends, I'm sorry, I've tried).

This sums up a fairly universal behavior that I think we all tend to take part in, and also see others taking part in when we all spot a problem but don't take action because we have the luxury (i.e. removed from any real chance of harm) to watch the problem be solved by anybody else. Then we use this position of luxurious inaction to judge and complain.

I'm surprised by the reactions I see here though. I'm not invested in the subject of this post, but I can see the hurt of this person in their post. It also appears that they are not bailing, but simply allowing others to try and do better, with suggestions to boot.

And here we sit, justifying our luxurious anger at a person so exhausted from doing free work that they have to walk away from what I assume is a passion of theirs.

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

#614

Post by quickthrower2 » Fri, Jul 13, 2018, 4:20 AM UTC

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…

It could be because the assumption that because python is famous, it must have some funding/money/company behind it.

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

#615

Post by blake_himself » Fri, Jul 13, 2018, 4:37 AM UTC

bogomipz wrote: post #612

sneakermoney wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here, I often find myself writing a loop-and-a-half and will on occasion repeat expressions to get around extra lines (if I cared about performance, I wouldn't be writing it in Python). I feel like a lot of the resistance is from people who think this is somehow bad style, because it's associated with a source of bugs in other languages. The same kind of people will argue endlessly against having 'goto' in a lan…

Can you explain what a "loop-and-a-half" is in Python?

    x = stuff
    while x:
        x = stuff

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

#616

Post by parrellel » Fri, Jul 13, 2018, 4:44 AM UTC

setgree wrote: post #490

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…

One person who understands and writes extremely well about this dynamic is Eliezer Yudkowsky. From the incomparable Harry potter and the Methods of Rationality : [0] ""I was going to be a hero, once," said Professor Quirrell, still looking upward. "Can you believe that, Miss Granger?" "No." "Thank you again, Miss Granger. It is true nonetheless... I was not naive, Miss Granger, I did not expect the power-holders to a…

It is worth mentioning that Eliezer Yudkowsky doesn't believe in the scientific method, and thinks it can be replaced with pure Bayesian reasoning, without, as far as I can tell, any data collection.

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

#617

Post by IgorPartola » Fri, Jul 13, 2018, 4:51 AM UTC

Havoc wrote: post #485

sametmax wrote: post #84

As a personnal note, you could feel that guido was already in this mood for a while from the tone of the last year tickets and mails. It's amazing he managed to not explode at somebody. I know i would have if our roles had been reversed in some exchanges we had. Good writers, comedians or directors know when to quit at the top their carreer. I think he is quitting before the situation was too taxing and that is wise…

>It's amazing he managed to not explode at somebody. Like a certain other BDFL occasionally does?

Don’t know why you are being downvoted. Linus’s tirades and diatribes are famous for how brutally personal they get. I still maintain that they are a waste of time and he would be a more effective leader if he limited his responses to “this is a bad idea” or “this isn’t done right” instead of writing pages long personal attacks on other members of the project.

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

#618

Post by rrmm » Fri, Jul 13, 2018, 4:56 AM UTC

lisper wrote: post #504

fit2rule wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 -…

Python has open-braces in the form of colons. If you use emacs, you can use the PASS statement as a close-brace and everything will auto-indent properly. Python purists have conniptions when they see this programming style, but I've used it for nearly 20 years and it works for me.

I usually close blocks with "#end ". It doesn't automatically format, but it at least makes it clear to me should the formatting get messed up. I keep thinking about changing the emacs mode to respect this, but it never causes enough of an issue to make me do it.

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

#619

Post by gsich » Fri, Jul 13, 2018, 5:08 AM UTC

IgorPartola wrote: post #617

Havoc wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's amazing he managed to not explode at somebody. Like a certain other BDFL occasionally does?

Don’t know why you are being downvoted. Linus’s tirades and diatribes are famous for how brutally personal they get. I still maintain that they are a waste of time and he would be a more effective leader if he limited his responses to “this is a bad idea” or “this isn’t done right” instead of writing pages long personal attacks on other members of the project.

As an outsider: It's fun.

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

#620

Post by dang » Fri, Jul 13, 2018, 5:12 AM UTC

comesee wrote: post #514

sctb wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 han…

The problem is that they aren't new ideas in the sense that matters here. They fall into very well-grooved grooves and we know from experience where those lead. It isn't groovy.

When we moderate HN like this, we don't mean to imply that you weren't posting in good faith. We're just being vigilant about what is known to cause flamewars. Flamewars are the #1 problem here because they consume everything they touch and can easily lead to the death-by-fire of the forum. We're basically just being Smokey Bear, or Smoky Bear's ranger friend.

It's interesting to observe that the above holds true even if you're right in everything you said. The old question "would you rather be right or alive?" applies here.