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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

#51

Post by DFHippie »

nabla9 wrote: post #34
dotdi wrote: post #8

> “Dripping water hollows out stone, not through force but through persistence.” ― Ovid It's not easy to take all the hate and ill-will day in day out. It's not even easy to ignore it, much less to deal with it. I respect Guido's decision even though I was quite sad to see him step down. It's not difficult to see that, with Pythons growing popularity, things would probably have become even worse for him in the future…

Social media gives unfair advantage to a horde of ankle biters, influences and opinionated individuals to affect things that matter. Even completely harmful promotion can snowball into supporting harmful behaviour. CTO or senior developer in a small company may feel the need to promote stuff they do by writing technical articles and commenting ongoing debates in the social media. Attaching comments to anything that i…

Not to bite any angles, but s/angle biter/ankle biter/.

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

#52

Post by wyldfire »

basic6 wrote: post #35
twerkmonsta wrote: post #10

No offense to Guido, and I love Python, but the transition from Python 2 to Python 3 is a reference point for me in terms of how NOT to update a programming language. Noone should ever be attacked, but surely someone deserves some criticism.

the := PEP stunk badly of cargo cult programming, you see knee-jerk proposals like that every time a blog makes the rounds and Guido deserved the pushback

I had to look this one up. PEP 572 [1] introduces "the walrus operator". Your claim that it "stunk badly" made me think that perhaps it was proposed and rejected, however it's listed as 'accepted' and among the new features from CPython 3.8. I suppose if you're the BDFL you can get your PEPs approved ;)

AFAICT it allows for optional binding. I suppose it might seem like 'cargo cult' because Rust and Swift have 'if let'?

[1] https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0572/

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

#53

Post by afiori »

ansible wrote: post #30
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 th…

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

Even here the utility is dubious. A main product of Trump's twitter is food for comedians or useless information. I believe it is important to keep updated on politics and to hold people in power to high standards, but few of the things Trump has to say cannot wait a day.

Actually you could say that twitter availability is a cause of Trump expressing so many controversial statements.

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

#54

Post by ravenstine »

Not that I think Guido's decision to leave his supervisory role is wrong, but couldn't he have simply not engaged with social media and just continue his role without all the negative garbage input? It's not like the things people say on Twitter without accountability is worth a damn.

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

#55

Post by afiori »

bluGill wrote: post #50
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…

I disagree, the python 2-3 change goes down as one of the best breaking changes I've ever seen. A long documented timeline. The u thing is a perfect example of learning from your mistakes and fixing them. Of course not having a breaking change is preferable, but that isn't always realistic.

So Best in the sense that we all have learned a lot from their failure?

Jokes aside, my uninformed opinion on how it could have been a better breaking change would have been to have the python3 able to understand properly python2. So that everyone could start using the same updated interpreter by setting appropriate flags or with thin wrappers. This way people could have moved to py3 and still run isolated bubbles of python 2.

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

#56

Post by kej »

thanatos_dem wrote: post #27
cletus wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 suppo…

>> 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.

Tauthon [0] kind of fits the bill here. It's a fork of 2.7 with some backported features from the 3 branch, so they're in a position to backport security fixes as well. How well that arrangement holds up once the PSF officially drops 2 remains to be seen, but if anybody is in a position to keep providing support it's probably them.

[0] https://github.com/naftaliharris/tauthon

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

#57

Post by comma_at »

thanatos_dem wrote: post #27
cletus wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 suppo…

I think the point is just because there's an EOL doesn't mean everyone will be ready or even willing to jump the ship. Companies run all sorts of old software. In 2017 7% of PCs were running Windows XP[1], which had EOL in 2014[2]. Why do you think an EOL will magically stop people using python 2.7? I'm sure even new code will be written after its EOL.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/how-many-people-use-windows-... [2] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/WindowsForBusiness/end-of-xp...

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

#59

Post by anc84 »

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.

You weren't serious, "like, ever" is obvious false. Of course there are good things.

For me: Tech support both ways, job offers, knowledge of latest releases and new developments in my area of expertise. It's awesome.

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

#60

Post by mixmastamyk »

Believe the Python3 change is a bit of a red-herring, everyone learned from that.

The breaking point was PEP 572 (ie :=) which was quite controversial. The lesson here: One shouldn't attempt to reverse 25-year old design decisions, not even GvR. Python is too big now.

There was a compromise (and more congruent) alternative, reuse of the "as" keyword, that was thrown out immediately, and proponents rammed 572 thru despite significant objection. That's when things got ugly. Personally I disagreed with that decision, and tried to support the compromise design.

In the end, didn't think 572 was the end of the world (will be occasionally useful, if ugly), and tried to stay polite, but sadly many didn't. Then he accepted 572 and stepped down, as if one last poke in the eye, unfortunately.

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