111–120 of 191 posts
It's curious that there was so much discussion about how to vote, while there seemed to be no question who would vote. The article mentions there was a pool of 94 eligible individuals but doesn't explain further where they come from. Does anyone have more info about that?
The link to the actual vote results [0] states that the electorate was "CPython core developers with a known email-address." [0] https://discuss.python.org/t/python-governance-vote-december...
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Not no process, since Matz is effectively BDFL, isn't he?
That’s the abscence of process. No votes, no committees, no grown people pretending they’re a court of appeal.
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The alternative to explicit rules, hierarchies and power structures usually isn't harmonious self-organization; it is unspoken rules, implicit hierarchies and hidden power structures.
I think a new BFDL would be a worse-is-better solution than all this play-government formality, to be honest. It seems to be an effective system for many languages, including Python in the past.
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Zizek is famous for pursuing a line very much against the grain; people intellectually similar to him argue for a society organised informally and locally, like a commune - but he argues that he'd rather be living in a bureaucracy in which he doesn't have to worry about all the smallest decisions and direct democracy. To him, the trouble of the USSR wasn't all the bureaucracy, it was that it wasn't bureaucratic enoug…
Zizek isn't a philosopher, he's an entertainer disguised as a philosopher. His entire schtick is: take something common sense, declare the opposite is true, and do so in a profound-sounding way with lots of eccentric gesturing and lisping. Chomsky on Zizek [1]: Posturing. There's no theory in any of this stuff. Try to find in all [Zizek's work] some principles from which you can deduce...empirically testable proposit…
You might say that he lacks rigor or prowess in his arguments, but those admit he's a philosopher. I can't see how you can deny he is a philosopher. Let's rephrase the essence of your argument: anyone who writes to entertain or repeatedly questions notions of common sense cannot possibly be a philosopher (despite large output and several research and teaching positions in and invitations to philosophy departments at universities around the world), if and only if a linguist says so and they have a lisp and some nervous tics.
I'd also suppose that none of the topics which Zizek addresses are philosophical ones: https://www.iep.utm.edu/zizek/
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I think there's nothing wrong with re-using good solutions that others have worked out instead of building your own just for the sake of being different. That's the open-source idea even, no? Freely reuse and build upon the work of others, so that we don't have to reinvent things again and again.
And yet open source is constantly reinventing the same things over and over again anyway. I think parent's complaint is that Debian's model has failed to produce good solutions of its own, and while that isn't necessarily a requirement, it does speak to potential limitations of the model
That's endemic to programming and the fields around it, even in closed source. I don't think it's a problem of open source, though open source might enable it in a few ways.
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Unlike other software projects, language design requires a single mind to think holistically, break things when needed, avoid feature creep while at the same time keep doors open for new ideas. It’svery intricate balance. Once language doesn’t have one leader, it will likely die in long term. I would call it death by committee:).
This is unfounded in practice. Having a BDFL did little to stop Python's feature set from growing, or to prevent design flaws like `lambda`, or to make Python 3 anything other than the poster child for how not to break things. Conversely, we can look to Javascript (yes, Javascript!) as an example of a language that was a total mess after being designed by a single person and that got immeasurably better once it began…
Councils, committees, multiple obtuse voting systems, governance documents, 'courts' of appeal... Why are they so keen to construct such a grim bureaucracy for themselves?
Politics in organisations is pretty grim. But, what would you have as an alternative? Decisions need to be made. Disagreements need to be resolved. Ad hoc resolutions to problems doesn't scale with increasing team size. Neither does anarchy. I don't think many people relish the idea of imposing such bureaucracy upon themselves and their fellow developers. However, when you have a sizeable organisation, there needs to…
Councils, committees, multiple obtuse voting systems, governance documents, 'courts' of appeal... Why are they so keen to construct such a grim bureaucracy for themselves?
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And yet open source is constantly reinventing the same things over and over again anyway. I think parent's complaint is that Debian's model has failed to produce good solutions of its own, and while that isn't necessarily a requirement, it does speak to potential limitations of the model
> it does speak to potential limitations of the model The parent compared a group of volunteers with the largest open-source company in the world, which is a part S&P 500. No other Linux distribution has a comparable amount of resources. Even Canonical is following the RedHat's lead (systemd, Wayland, PulseAudio).