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Guido blames social media for his decision to abandon the supervision of Python

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Re: Guido blames social media for his decision to abandon the supervision of Python

#21

Post by StavrosK »

thanatos_dem wrote: post #19
cletus wrote: post #18

Serious question: did anything good come out of paying attention to Twitter? Like, ever? I'm sure it has its bubble-living adherents here. Then again, so did Quora. As for the claim of "questioning [his] authority", isn't that a given? With or without social media. That's pretty much human nature. It's up to you to establish the tone and medium of how people interact with you. Linus, for example, is pretty much stric…

> Here we are in 2019 with no end in sight for Python 2.7 An end is in sight, is coming soon, and it’s sort of concerning that more folks haven’t realized it yet - https://pythonclock.org/

Seriously, I wonder how many of the people who proclaim "no end in sight" for 2.7 are actually using Python. In the usage I can see, the majority of the ecosystem seems to support 3, and at least a large minority has stopped supporting 2.

Re: Guido blames social media for his decision to abandon the supervision of Python

#22

Post by dswalter »

cletus wrote: post #18

Serious question: did anything good come out of paying attention to Twitter? Like, ever? I'm sure it has its bubble-living adherents here. Then again, so did Quora. As for the claim of "questioning [his] authority", isn't that a given? With or without social media. That's pretty much human nature. It's up to you to establish the tone and medium of how people interact with you. Linus, for example, is pretty much stric…

> no end in sight for Python 2.7

That's not correct. Numpy, for example, will not be supporting python2.7 starting January 1st, 2020 (https://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy-1.14.2/neps/dropping-python...), and there are others in the process.

Python itself will stop supporting 2.7 on January 1st, 2020. (see https://devguide.python.org/#status-of-python-branches)

Has it been poorly managed? Yes.

Will a number of companies skip upgrading from python2 to python3 and instead rewrite it in Go or Rust? Absolutely.

But "no end in sight" is not an accurate depiction of the current state of affairs.

Re: Guido blames social media for his decision to abandon the supervision of Python

#23

Post by Analemma_ »

StavrosK wrote: post #21
thanatos_dem wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Here we are in 2019 with no end in sight for Python 2.7 An end is in sight, is coming soon, and it’s sort of concerning that more folks haven’t realized it yet - https://pythonclock.org/

Seriously, I wonder how many of the people who proclaim "no end in sight" for 2.7 are actually using Python. In the usage I can see, the majority of the ecosystem seems to support 3, and at least a large minority has stopped supporting 2.

I think they’re both true. People who are “extremely online” and up-to-date with technology developments are all done with Python 2.7 and can say the end is near, but they’re not the only people. There’s an entire dark matter world of businesses still on 2.7, maintained by people who don’t live in the Bay and don’t read Hacker News, and so they’re largely invisible. It will be a long time before they all switch.

Re: Guido blames social media for his decision to abandon the supervision of Python

#24

Post by cletus »

thanatos_dem wrote: post #19
cletus wrote: post #18

Serious question: did anything good come out of paying attention to Twitter? Like, ever? I'm sure it has its bubble-living adherents here. Then again, so did Quora. As for the claim of "questioning [his] authority", isn't that a given? With or without social media. That's pretty much human nature. It's up to you to establish the tone and medium of how people interact with you. Linus, for example, is pretty much stric…

> Here we are in 2019 with no end in sight for Python 2.7 An end is in sight, is coming soon, and it’s sort of concerning that more folks haven’t realized it yet - https://pythonclock.org/

No one told me someone had put an arbitrary countdown on the Internet. Well that's completely different.

Python may not officially support 2.7 in 2020+. What's to stop someone else backporting security patches and necessary fixes as needed ad infinitum? I think you're underestimating just how little impetus there is to migrate from 2 to 3.

Re: Guido blames social media for his decision to abandon the supervision of Python

#25

Post by user17843 »

anc84 wrote: post #12
caymanjim wrote: post #6

Every leader throughout history has had to put up with the discontent of the governed. Being thick-skinned and ignoring the barbs is part of the job. Social media is a red herring here; this sort of thing has happened on all forms of social media since the dawn of computing. It used to be on mailing lists and Usenet. Now it's primarily on Twitter. After 30 years of leading a project, anyone is going to get worn down.

The psychological feedback loops and self-affirmation have been tweaked to perversion and addiction by social media. There are notifications, +1, heart, subreferences, everything, everywhere. It has become much more overwhelming.

yes, it's sickening. I do my best to filter out all the like and upvote stuff, but it doesn't really help because it changes the entire atmosphere of a platform and thus affects me too.

Re: Guido blames social media for his decision to abandon the supervision of Python

#26

Post by guitarbill »

cletus wrote: post #18

Serious question: did anything good come out of paying attention to Twitter? Like, ever? I'm sure it has its bubble-living adherents here. Then again, so did Quora. As for the claim of "questioning [his] authority", isn't that a given? With or without social media. That's pretty much human nature. It's up to you to establish the tone and medium of how people interact with you. Linus, for example, is pretty much stric…

> Why remove it in the first place? It makes no sense.

Presumably because a tool like 2to3 could strip it out, leaving it in is confusing, and there already existed a better solution for forwards compatibility (unicode literals future flag). With hindsight, the wrong call, but not completely nonsensical from what I can tell.

Re: Guido blames social media for his decision to abandon the supervision of Python

#27

Post by thanatos_dem »

cletus wrote: post #24
thanatos_dem wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Here we are in 2019 with no end in sight for Python 2.7 An end is in sight, is coming soon, and it’s sort of concerning that more folks haven’t realized it yet - https://pythonclock.org/

No one told me someone had put an arbitrary countdown on the Internet. Well that's completely different. Python may not officially support 2.7 in 2020+. What's to stop someone else backporting security patches and necessary fixes as needed ad infinitum? I think you're underestimating just how little impetus there is to migrate from 2 to 3.

> No one told me someone had put an arbitrary countdown on the Internet. Well that's completely different.

No idea what I did to deserve that tone. That site also gives a high level overview of the change, which is why I linked it.

> What’s to stop someone else from backporting security fixes as needed ad infinitum?

Who? I haven’t heard anyone express a willingness to take up that mantle. “Someone will probably support it by the end of the year” is not the most robust security model.

Re: Guido blames social media for his decision to abandon the supervision of Python

#28

Post by brittohalloran »

jsmeaton wrote: post #3

The governance model has already been decided, and the steering council elected. https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwj9...

PEP-8016 [1] has the details of the steering council mechanism (5 person elected council, describes their powers), and PEP-8100 [2] has the results of the election and now shows vote totals.

[1] https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-8016/

[2] https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-8100/#results

Re: Guido blames social media for his decision to abandon the supervision of Python

#29

Post by Bahamut »

Analemma_ wrote: post #23
StavrosK wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously, I wonder how many of the people who proclaim "no end in sight" for 2.7 are actually using Python. In the usage I can see, the majority of the ecosystem seems to support 3, and at least a large minority has stopped supporting 2.

I think they’re both true. People who are “extremely online” and up-to-date with technology developments are all done with Python 2.7 and can say the end is near, but they’re not the only people. There’s an entire dark matter world of businesses still on 2.7, maintained by people who don’t live in the Bay and don’t read Hacker News, and so they’re largely invisible. It will be a long time before they all switch.

Even in the Bay Area there are companies still with Python 2.7 with no real migration strategy yet. I maintain several such packages at work myself.

Re: Guido blames social media for his decision to abandon the supervision of Python

#30

Post by ansible »

cletus wrote: post #18

Serious question: did anything good come out of paying attention to Twitter? Like, ever? I'm sure it has its bubble-living adherents here. Then again, so did Quora. As for the claim of "questioning [his] authority", isn't that a given? With or without social media. That's pretty much human nature. It's up to you to establish the tone and medium of how people interact with you. Linus, for example, is pretty much stric…

> Serious question: did anything good come out of paying attention to Twitter? Like, ever? I'm sure it has its bubble-living adherents here. Then again, so did Quora.

To know what's going through the USA President's brain right now? Yes.

For a leader of a technical project? I doubt it.

If anyone's got a concern about what you're working on, and can't be arsed to go to the relevant forum or mailing list and say so there... well, it probably wasn't valid anyway.

Some (even if trivally small) barrier to entry for a technical community is good and useful.

Twitter on the other hand... maybe a non-existent barrier to entry is good for political discourse (that's another conversation), but I don't see how you're easily going to distinguish the wheat from the chaff on really wide-open forums like that for technical communities.

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