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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”

#751

Post by armitron »

wrmsr wrote: post #537
nikofeyn wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how is python like lisp?

It's lisp without the curse. You have an arbitrarily dynamic runtime but enough structure and cultural idiom against abusing it that it has flourished. Compare for example type annotations in python versus those in clojure - clojure's expressivity and the culture's tendency to use it pervasively make meaningful annotations much more difficult than in python, even with python's crazy calling convention. Additionally a…

Python is nothing like Lisp, please stop with the generalizations. When it comes to stupid comparisons, Ruby is more Lisp than Python, at least it's got Symbols.

Python is not homoiconic, it doesn't have {reader/compiler/normal}macros, it doesn't have symbols, it doesn't have proper lexical scope, it doesn't have dynamic scope, it doesn't have conditions and restarts, not every statement is an expression, it's full of special cases and is monstrously complicated if you look beneath the surface [thus all the hacks in PEP form].

How is it Lisp when it doesn't have the special magic that makes Lisp so powerful?

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

#752

Post by lispm »

wrmsr wrote: post #537
nikofeyn wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how is python like lisp?

It's lisp without the curse. You have an arbitrarily dynamic runtime but enough structure and cultural idiom against abusing it that it has flourished. Compare for example type annotations in python versus those in clojure - clojure's expressivity and the culture's tendency to use it pervasively make meaningful annotations much more difficult than in python, even with python's crazy calling convention. Additionally a…

Python is an object-oriented BASIC.

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

#753

Post by lispm »

armitron wrote: post #750
cutler wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Python is nothing like Lisp, where did you come up with that? Three things that are key in Lisp: Symbols, environments and lexical scope. Python has none of these.

Python reminds me more of an object-oriented BASIC. Mostly imperative control flow. Lots of assignments. Lots of state manipulation.

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

#754

Post by kazinator »

armitron wrote: post #750
cutler wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Python is nothing like Lisp, where did you come up with that? Three things that are key in Lisp: Symbols, environments and lexical scope. Python has none of these.

Most of the examples of Python program design that are held up as "Pythonic" can be described as Fortran with dynamic typing.

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

#755

Post by kazinator »

lispm wrote: post #753
armitron wrote: post #750

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python is nothing like Lisp, where did you come up with that? Three things that are key in Lisp: Symbols, environments and lexical scope. Python has none of these.

Python reminds me more of an object-oriented BASIC. Mostly imperative control flow. Lots of assignments. Lots of state manipulation.

Perhaps the biggest computer science cluster-fuck in Python is that there is no syntactic distinction between instantiating/binding a variable and assigning to it.

Python 3 makes it worse by adding some declarative stupidies nonlocal and global:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_shadowing#Python

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

#756

Post by LBarret »

rabidrat wrote: post #356
patejam wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The indentation should be almost the same as any other language. Unless you have an aversion to consistent code-style. Python whitespace was only annoying for me years ago when it still had trouble handling tabs and spaces in the same file, and you would run into literally invisible bugs. I haven't run into that in a long time, though.

It's also basically impossible to cut-and-paste code from a web forum. Was that "else" from the inner or the outer "if"?

yes, but that's so minor compared to the gain of a more readable syntax... really an edge case.

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

#757

Post by treatpeoplewell »

flukus wrote: post #727
treatpeoplewell wrote: post #694

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you showed me the sentence "If you call me a dickhead it's not a personal insult" removed from all context I would immediately know that it could only have been posted by a brain genius at Hacker News.

> I would immediately know that it could only have been posted by a brain genius at Hacker News. Have you ever worked or even associated with people in the blue collar world? Dickhead is tame enough to call your friends. Ever watched Gordon Ramsey? He might have better writers than most chefs but the abuse levels are industry wide.

Dude, when you're in a hole, stop digging.

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

#758

Post by gmiller123456 »

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…

>Good writers, comedians or directors know when to quit at the top their carreer.

Actually, no. I know this is getting away from the main point of the discussion a bit. But Adam Savage gave a good explanation as to why most paid people quit at the height of their career [1]. The idea is that once people pass their prime, the work they produce is worth less. So the only way such careers could continue would be for producers to overpay for a product, or for the actors to continue working just as hard for less money.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGeS6m3hVk8

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

#759

Post by meshko »

DanBC wrote: post #645
reirob wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe this is the reason that the certain other BDFL is still in service? Maybe it's part of psycho-hygiene in order to be able to continue? I sincerely don't know - your question just triggered my experience when working in psychiatry and seeing how the staff was venting, talking and joking about patients - once the doors were closed. I was very shocked, was quite young, around 20 when serving - but one of the docto…

I work in patient safety in English MH settings. The culture you describe is toxic, and I would have reported all of those HCPs to their trust (using the trust complaints process), to the CQC, and possibly to their professional registration bodies. > is part of psycho-hygiene that allows the people to be able to continue to work and keep a certain distance. It's also a culture of de-humanisation that allows abuse to…

I agree. I know some doctors and while they do tell stories about the patients (obviously completely anonymously) and sometimes have a laugh about them, you can always feel certain base level of respect, love and care, not unlike someone telling about their kids doing something silly. Good doctors don't dehumanize their patients, ever.

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

#760

Post by JohnBooty »

VikingCoder wrote: post #307
JohnBooty wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why is representative democracy the best system for managing a repo? The most obvious reason (to me) is that it's sort of preposterous to think that all votes are equal. I've never even used Python. Should my vote be worth the same as Guido's when it comes to some technical decision? This is a problem in representative democracies as well, of course, but you've a little more protection. There's also the issue of pr…

> it's sort of preposterous to think that all votes are equal. Sorry if this wasn't clear, but I think there should be different classes of users, with different powers. No, your vote should not have the same power as someone who has carefully maintained Python for years. But if there are nine peers, maybe they would like a bit of automation to help them 1) triage bugs 2) vote on actions 3) take those actions automat…

    Sorry if this wasn't clear, but I think there should be different classes of users, with different powers.
If we're going to choose a class of privileged users to enact policies on our behalf, sounds like we'd wind up with something like a representative democracy anyway.
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