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Astral to Join OpenAI
901–910 of 951 posts
Re: Astral to Join OpenAI
#902Earlier quoted context omitted.
Writing a literal parser isn’t too hard (and there’s presumably an existing one in the source code for the language). Writing something that understands all the methods that come in a Django model goes way beyond parsing the code, and is a genuine struggle in language where you can’t execute the code without worrying about side effects like Python. Ty should give them a base for that where the model is able to see th…
If you’re talking about magic methods/properties enabled by reflection and macros, then you’re no longer statically analyzing the code.
Static analysis just requires that you don't actually execute the code. It's possible (sometimes) to infer what methods/properties would be create without actually statically analyzing the code.
E.g. mypy has a plugin to read the methods and return types of SQLAlchemy records, I believe without actually executing them.
Obviously not globally true, but in limited domains/scenarios you can see what would exist without actually executing the code.
Re: Astral to Join OpenAI
#903What strikes me most about this acquisition isn't the AI angle. It's the question of why so many open source tools get built by startup teams in the first place. I maintain an open source project funded by the Sovereign Tech Fund. Getting there wasn't easy: the application process is long, the amounts are modest compared to a VC round, and you have to build community trust before any of that becomes possible. But the…
> It's the question of why so many open source tools get built by startup teams in the first place
The capitalist answer would be that markets are more efficient than governments at capital allocation and thus private companies are better positioned to develop software that solves real-world-problems, and in this case are so much more efficient at it that the stuff those companies give away for free as open source still dwarves publicly funded efforts.
My own opinion is that there are plenty of software problems worth solving that don't fit neatly into that bucket and you're likely right that some increased degree of public funding around them is worthwhile. In the US that tends to end up flowing through the university systems. I mean, the internet itself was DoD funding going to university labs.
Re: Astral to Join OpenAI
#904Earlier quoted context omitted.
that makes zero sense to me. developing something like ruff from scratch takes a lot of things happening - someone having the idea, the time to develop it from scratch in their free time, or the money to do it as a job, and perhaps the need to find collaborators if it's too large a project for one person. but now ruff is there, there's no need to build it from scratch. if I wanted to build a python linter or formatte…
> the time to develop it [not] from scratch in their free time, or the money... How do you think the magic of open source resolves this issue? Think about this for it to make some sense > I would simply fork The only simple part here is pressing the "fork" button, which only gives you exactly the same code that already exists, without user awareness or distribution
you're moving the goalposts now. I never said it would be easy to get used awareness or adoption, just that it would be a lot easier to write a new linter by forking and continuing ruff development than it would doing so from scratch.
as to how the magic of open source resolves the time and money issue, it literally gives you the building blocks you need to not have to invent everything from scratch. how is that not significant?
Re: Astral to Join OpenAI
#905Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the time to develop it [not] from scratch in their free time, or the money... How do you think the magic of open source resolves this issue? Think about this for it to make some sense > I would simply fork The only simple part here is pressing the "fork" button, which only gives you exactly the same code that already exists, without user awareness or distribution
you're moving the goalposts now. I never said it would be easy to get used awareness or adoption, just that it would be a lot easier to write a new linter by forking and continuing ruff development than it would doing so from scratch. as to how the magic of open source resolves the time and money issue, it literally gives you the building blocks you need to not have to invent everything from scratch. how is that not…
> just that it would be a lot easier to write a new linter by forking
And I never said about the relative ease, you've moved the goalpost there yourself. $1m required to maintain is much less than $10m required to create, yet when you don't have $1m it doesn't matter - you'll still fail, and reasons are the same as the reasons you couldn't build the original.
Blocks lying around does not a building make, so you haven't addressed that magic either.
Re: Astral to Join OpenAI
#906Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every uv-related post here had a few people going "i don't want to use VC funded stuff!! what about rug pull!!", although perhaps they were drowned out eventually all the people (like me) going "uv is fantastic and solves 15 years of python packaging hell"
Maybe it is a GenX, Boomer thingie, but setting a couple of environment variables, or multiple virtual envs hardly felt as packaging hell.
Perhaps you and I are POSIXly Correct people who easily stay on the golden path, but for the average Python user the hell is all too common: https://xkcd.com/1987/
Re: Astral to Join OpenAI
#907Earlier quoted context omitted.
Part of the reason Astral as a team is so well liked is precisely because they are not part of the main fold or related to "Core Python"; they are an independent vendor, one that delivered high quality code and listened directly to users and their own (extensive) experience to do so, and they succeeded at that repeatedly. Python packaging has {been seen as, actually been} miserable for years , and so by the same toke…
Does that not also suggest (cautious, make sure we back it up with our actions) optimism about this acquisition? We're not breaking up the band. These tools will be in the same hands as before. And it would be extremely value-destructive to bring in a team like ours and then undermine what made us valued and successful.
Just to be clear: I think uv and the other Astral projects will probably be just fine! I don't really think this the end at all.
I was just trying to explain why people are so upset by the perceived change of hands; that perception isn't perfect of course, it's a mixture of fear, honesty, skepticism, truth etc. I think some people here are just being absurd (e.g. the idea that community projects are magically more sustainable by the fact they are community projects is literally just wishcasting with a mix of Red-Dots-On-Plane syndrome). But I can definitely understand the source of it.
Re: Astral to Join OpenAI
#908Earlier quoted context omitted.
you're moving the goalposts now. I never said it would be easy to get used awareness or adoption, just that it would be a lot easier to write a new linter by forking and continuing ruff development than it would doing so from scratch. as to how the magic of open source resolves the time and money issue, it literally gives you the building blocks you need to not have to invent everything from scratch. how is that not…
> just that it would be a lot easier to write a new linter by forking And I never said about the relative ease, you've moved the goalpost there yourself. $1m required to maintain is much less than $10m required to create, yet when you don't have $1m it doesn't matter - you'll still fail, and reasons are the same as the reasons you couldn't build the original. Blocks lying around does not a building make, so you haven…
it does not take $1M to maintain a linter, these tools can and have been built and maintained by people in their spare time. astral built a better one, for which I am genuinely grateful to them, but it's not like they invented linting or that the open source community was just waiting around for some business to supply their tooling. indeed developer tools are notoriously hard to make money off simply because so many good ones have been developed as either solo or community open source projects, largely by people in their free time.
Re: Astral to Join OpenAI
#909Earlier quoted context omitted.
Python existed for years before uv with a huge ecosystem, and will continue to do so after/if it dies
uv, yes*, but really PEP 723: https://peps.python.org/pep-0723/ * disclosure: We are a commercial client of astral.sh
Sounds a lot like vim/emacs modelines. This is neat for standalone scripts.
Re: Astral to Join OpenAI
#910Earlier quoted context omitted.
Idk how anyone could sustain the impression that pip was not broken unless they had basically never used anything else (including Linux package managers) long enough to have even a basic understanding of it. And that's a big part of what's so frustrating about Python generally: it seems to be a language used by lots of people who've never used anything else and have an attitude like "why would I ever try anything els…
I had a breakthrough moment when someone at a workplace (software dev) said something about a thing that wasn't working on their device. Their language made it clear to me that they didn't know how to troubleshoot to figure out how to fix it. But they could write software that ran on millions of devices. Ok, that made me take a step back.
In the early 2000s I was in a rough patch in my career and wound up working at a small town web design shop that had done a lot of really amazing work, like a line of business system for car dealers, an e-commerce site for vineyards, a custom CRM for an academic department, etc. Nobody there knew about version control (not so weird in 2005) or how to write joins in SQL.