A post by Guido van Rossum removed for violating Python community guidelines

Yes. What you are missing is the separate "Enforcement Procedures" section: https://policies.python.org/python.org/code-of-conduct/Enfor... . Some quotes:

> If the incident occurred outside the community, but a community member's mental health or physical safety may be negatively impacted if no action is taken, the incident may be in scope.

IOW: they hold themselves free to go after people for stating political opinions entirely outside of any Python-related context, if someone else in a Python space deems those opinions sufficiently traumatizing.

> Does this pose a safety risk? Does the behavior put a person's physical safety at risk? Will this incident severely negatively impact someone's mental health?

Again, getting "triggered" by something is considered a matter of "safety". Some people are apparently fragile, and not responsible for their own actions, while others have a moral duty not to offend them.

> A person who makes a report should receive a follow-up email stating what action was taken in response to the report. If the work group decided no response was needed, they should provide an email explaining why it was not a Code of Conduct violation. Reports that are not made in good faith (such as "reverse sexism" or "reverse racism") may receive no response.

IOW: you have no recourse if people discriminate against you for being white or for being male. Not only that, but proposing that such a thing occurred is considered inherently "bad faith". And they will stuff terms in your mouth for this that you didn't actually use. [0] But not only that, when I was banned, they held up such an argument (by the way, the accusation that I even made such an argument was completely false) as itself a Code of Conduct violation, despite no language in that document which could possibly support such a claim.

Speaking of which, they don't even follow these procedures if they're inconvenient. See the "Follow up with the reported person" section? None of that bears any resemblance to how I was treated. (Not that it could, because I did nothing wrong and my "behaviour" had no reasonable "negative impact". [1])

There are tons of other "cultural" aspects you seem to be unaware of here. For example, defenders of the Work Group and their policies will constantly bring up (without naming names, as if anyone were unaware) the Adria Richards "Donglegate" incident from PyCon 2013. This is always described as a cautionary tale about what might happen to others like Richards without their CoC enforcement. It is never mentioned that Richards eavesdropped on a private conversation, took offense to a joke not intended to cause harm to anyone (and not even jokingly proposing any harmful idea!), and then ignored all the incident reporting procedures in the newly written PyCon CoC, opting instead to skip straight to social media for a round of public shaming.

[0] It's people with this political position who use the terms "reverse sexism" and "reverse racism"; people who correctly recognize the fact that racism can victimize white people (and be directly the fault of people who are not white, acting fully on their own agency) also correctly just call it "racism". Similarly for sexism.

[1] If you don't take that at face value, you are welcome to read my own backup of my posts related to the banning: https://zahlman.github.io/dpo_archive/ .

I would appreciate more information about this.

It takes no effort to find arguments such as https://medium.com/let-s-begin/how-to-rename-your-master-bra... .

Github themselves tried to push the change on people, and reporting on the issue used phrasing describing the original choice as "no longer appropriate" as if this were some authoritative consensus (e.g. https://www.theserverside.com/feature/Why-GitHub-renamed-its... ). Github's change was disruptive because repositories created on GitHub wouldn't work properly locally in Git (depending on various details) and this was happening to users with very little technical understanding and no reason to care about the underlying political issue.

But aside from that, it's very obvious that many people think there's "something wrong with" using master as the default name. If they didn't, there never would have been an issue in the first place because nobody would have proposed to change it.

There is nobody out there advocating for the change without bringing up some strange hand-waving argument about colonialism. Not a single one of these people can demonstrate how using the name "master" actually causes harm - because it doesn't. But hordes of them are willing to argue for making the change anyway.

> However it's weird if you say master is the "one true name" and it HAS to be master.

Nobody says this. They say that they don't want others pushing (or literally pull-requesting, in many cases) changes on them for ideological reasons that have nothing to do with the business of their project.

> Like, why do you care? That's odd. That's what some people point out.

No, there's nothing strange about it at all. What is "odd" is the rhetorical strategy of trying to shame people for a benign choice, gaslight that they're the ones being insistent and ideological, and then gaslight that no such shaming is occurring.

> For some people changing master -> main isn't a nothing burger, it's actively harmful.

No, what's "actively harmful" is the idea that people should be compelled to change things because outsiders don't like them (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entryism). Also the compatibility break mentioned above.

I find it much more readable, and more importantly more expressive. Certain new features are missteps IMO, but I just don't use them. But more importantly, the language has been moving away from cryptic %-encodings and other C idioms.

As for the standard library, that was already happening for a long time, and is inevitable. The world has fundamentally changed. In Python's heyday it was much harder to download and install and use a third-party library, so a rich standard library was an asset. Now it's full of specialized code that handles obscure and increasingly irrelevant data formats; multiple overlapping hacks for binary data; terrible and confusing date support; awkward interfaces that haven't stood the test of time (particularly all the networking stuff; Requests is one of the most downloaded PyPI packages, along with its dependencies which are probably almost never downloaded for any other reason); etc.

Lots of people still seem to think that the 2->3 migration was a mistake. They couldn't be more wrong. The old way of handling "strings" was abysmal, and spit in the face of the Zen. Error messages were confusing and implicit conversions abounded.

Also, just for the record: Guido van Rossum was in favour of the walrus operator. In fact, he co-authored the PEP (https://peps.python.org/pep-0572/), along with Tim Peters.