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

mail.python.org

671–680 of 764 posts

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

#671
post #668
post #652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing personal there, it's a generic insult. Unless Linus know's about the persons breastfeeding history of course. My understanding is that the person being derided here isn't even a kernel developer.

This is laughable. What would you consider a "personal" insult?

Something personal to an individual, insulting their looks, background, family, etc.

If you call me a dickhead it's not a personal insult, call me fat it's getting there and when it's that [redacted] event when I was drunk a few weeks ago it's personal.

Anyone that find that Linus spray as "brutally personal" needs a cup of cement.

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

#672

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.

[deleted]

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

#673
post #72
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's PHP and not Python, but every time I read something like this from a major open source figure, I always think of this old PHP mailing list thread: https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=50696

O_o I wonder how many times I've spoken to someone and didn't realize who it was/how important they were because of the anonymity of the internet.

I wrote to Ken Thompson when I was an undergrad doing a history of computing essay. And he wrote back with a potted autobiography! It was probably a bit before email became the scourge that it is now.

The sad part is: I lost the email in a transition from one machine/set of floppy disk backups to another.

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

#674
post #665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but for me, Lua is just far more elegant, It's curious... Lua is my favorite language due to its elegance, but I would love it even more if it used significant indentation (using tabs, of course) instead of "end" blocks.

OTOH, I would love Python even more if I could do: x = function(x) return x*x end and not use those awful Python lambdas... Not that it really matters though, bridges still get built.

Your example is already doable without lambdas:

    def f(x): return x * x

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

#675
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the bad decision was treating bytes and strings interchangeably in the first place. 99% of the hardest to fix breakage was due to that, and it was the right call to pay that price all at once.

Bad decision? UTF was Standarized in 1993, python was first released in 1991. You can't decide to use something that hasn't been invented yet. Back then bytes and string were the same thing. Java did do it right but by 1995 the industry had already seen the problems of differing character sets.

>Back then bytes and string were the same thing.

No, they weren't. Impossible as it seems, we had encodings (including multi-byte encodings) for decades before UTF.

Python couldn't use UTF-8 in 1991, but it could very well tag strings with a specific encoding, instead of treating them as a bucket of bytes C-style.

>Java did do it right but by 1995 the industry had already seen the problems of differing character sets.

We had seen the problems of "differing character sets" for decades already (Windows vs DOS version of the same language encodings was a classic example for most users, but the problems go back to EBCDIC and so on).

Java just did a more right thing, but we already have a need for generic string types that can handle multiple encodings and know what they contain and how to convert from one to another.

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

#676
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the outrage, it's the entitlement. People have always been outraged, the major difference I've seen is the rampant sense of entitlement. I'm not sure if it's a result of bad parenting or something else, but it's slowly becoming a major issue for the entirety of the human race.

Completely agree with you. Heck I realized I have the same entitlement issue after running into 2-3 people who were on higher spectrum of entitlement. I was having issue with their behavior but realized I do the same sometimes. I am trying to balance it out. The sad thing is people are not even aware that they have this issue. I think social media is responsible for breeding this sense of entitlement among people.

I'm not sure it is social media, rather I think it's the price. Free or very cheap opens you up to a group of people you wouldn't normally have to deal with.

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

#677
"bus lurking around the corner" caused me a Family Guy style flashback.

"Like that time [victim of an unsolved bus stop stabbing] was killed by a bus." victim sitting alone at a bus stop. glint of light from the dark alley in back. bus jumps out, stabs victim. bus enters street, transforms into normal bus, drives off.

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

#678

I'm not at all optimistic about this. I understand Guido's motives and sympathise with him, but I'm afraid this will have a very detrimental effect on Python and how its development is managed. He says: "... I don't ever want to have to fight so hard for a PEP and find that so many people despise my decisions." I can only imagine what might happen without a single decision-maker -- just think of all the vitriol that…

Unfortunately, electing a single product owner is now a decision the core devs will have to weigh in on - which means it wont happen. Design by committee is a terrible way to run Python

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

#679
post #665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OTOH, I would love Python even more if I could do: x = function(x) return x*x end and not use those awful Python lambdas... Not that it really matters though, bridges still get built.

Your example is already doable without lambdas: def f(x): return x * x

To clarify: the point I was trying to make was that the explicit 'end' in Lua allows for closures that are more nice (subjective) than Python lambdas. Something both JS and Lua got right, but with which Python ended up with a much more limited syntax.
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