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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”

#681

Post by enriquto »

sebcat wrote: post #665
enriquto wrote: post #660

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.

it looks a bit perverse to use the same name for the function and for its argument, but maybe it's just me

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

#682

Post by jamienicol »

flukus wrote: post #671
okal wrote: post #668

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are plenty of people who don't like being called dickheads and choose not to work in those environments. I will never contribute a line of code upstream to the kernel, as will plenty more people who are much smarter than I am.

You and Linus and all his fanboys will no doubt say the kernel is better off without us.

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

#683

Post by gugagore »

mijamo wrote: post #653
stormbeta wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big one I want to see, because it's one of my biggest frustrations with Python, is to finally make lambdas work like every other contemporary language instead of being inexplicably limited to a single expression simply because Guido couldn't come up with a syntax that agreed with him. There's so many cases (arguably including the problem this PEP was designed to solve!) where having a real inline closure is just…

Nononono God please NO! I would KILL not to make that happen. So many devs abuse those in every language that has that. Even lambas get sometimes abused in Python (and I have a few examples in our codebase unfortunately). Expanding lambdas' scope is the LAST thing I want in Python, this would just lead to worst codebases, with nearly 0 benefit. If you want to do something that needs 2 expressions, just create a godda…

It's useful to be able to give names to things and it's also useful to not be able to give names to things.

It could and could also not be useful to give names to all the subexpressions in the following

w = a(b(c(x,y),z))

You could impose a limitation on how many function can be in a single expression, forcing you to give names. That's analogous to your favorite feature, no?

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

#684

Post by sevensor »

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…

I think EWD was basically in the right to push hard for structured programming, but I also like Knuth's nuanced take:

https://pic.plover.com/knuth-GOTO.pdf

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

#685

Post by kqr »

jessaustin wrote: post #197
ben509 wrote: 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.

The API in 2 is not optimal, but they fixed it the wrong way. As you know, some operations make sense with bytes, and some make sense with character strings. The operations that make sense with character strings would also make sense with bytes when an encoding is specified . Therefore, there should just be a way of annotating bytes with a suggested encoding. Then byte-oriented packages (e.g. those that deal with dat…

Encodings are related to storage and transportation -- not business logic. You should not have to deal with encodings inside your application, so forcing programmers to deal with encodings at the point it matters, when text enters and exits the application, is thus sound.

If yoy truly don't care whether or not the text is decodable (which is sometimes the case), then don't read it as a string, read it as a byte array.

You can still have methods that are generic over byte arrays and text, since that is an orthogonal concern.

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

#686

Post by jessaustin »

ubernostrum wrote: post #262
jessaustin wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The API in 2 is not optimal, but they fixed it the wrong way. As you know, some operations make sense with bytes, and some make sense with character strings. The operations that make sense with character strings would also make sense with bytes when an encoding is specified . Therefore, there should just be a way of annotating bytes with a suggested encoding. Then byte-oriented packages (e.g. those that deal with dat…

Then byte-oriented packages (e.g. those that deal with data sent over an interface like a socket or pipe) could simply ignore the issue of encoding. Long and bitter experience has shown that people who think they can "simply ignore" the "issue" of encoding actually can't. That mindset is mostly a more polite way of saying "people who assume everything is ASCII all the time, or at most an encoding that always has one…

For lots of applications it doesn't matter how many bytes are in a character, because characters don't matter. Even within a particular application, it's common for characters to only matter in a few particular locations. It would still have been a win for python, to make such applications easier to write and maintain.

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

#687

Post by kamyarg »

munificent wrote: post #295
sjm-lbm wrote: 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

I have yet to encounter any user so hostile in my open source projects, thankfully. But when the time arises, the line I have prepared is: I'm really sorry you ran into this issue. To make things better, I've given you a full refund.

Ah, now I want to contribute to open source community just because I might be able to say this to some unappreciative prick. :)

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

#688

Post by crawfordcomeaux »

gsich wrote: post #680
mindfulplay wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software construction shouldn't need this level of drama or comedy. It almost feels like hero worship.

Why not? All work and no play ...

I prefer nonviolent work and play.

I also prefer people who role model nonviolence for future developers.

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

#689

Post by v_lisivka »

dang wrote: post #636
comesee wrote: post #634

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would be new in the sense that matters? I think it was a natural flow of discussion: someone gives their perspective on an event, another person shares a related scientific fact that supports that perspective. You aren't being clear, instead you are throwing out abstract words like flamewar, flamebait, groovy, etc. I'm not getting the memo. Please be specific, what exactly was wrong with that post? Do you have a…

Sorry, but this is the classic legalistic gambit of the troll. It's not hard to figure out the intended use of the site. If you don't want to use it that way, please don't post here and please don't make new accounts to get around the restrictions.

Dang, you are not listening to user problems.

I was moderator for more than 10 years on linux.org.ua and nobody told me that I was bad moderator. I also regular user on other forums/sites, so I have view on the problem from both sides.

HN is badly moderated. However, most problems with moderation/flames/etc., can be fixed using technology or by writing better rules. If you are interesting in fixing of HN problems, contact me: vlisivka@gmail.com .

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

#690

Post by sebcat »

enriquto wrote: post #681
sebcat wrote: 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.

it looks a bit perverse to use the same name for the function and for its argument, but maybe it's just me

Lexical scope, I like it
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