> I don't ever want to have to fight so hard for a
PEP and find that so many people despise my decisions.
Leading a large open source project must be terrible in this age of constant outrage :-(
replies(9):
Leading a large open source project must be terrible in this age of constant outrage :-(
I do understand people's points about "the age of outrage" and "internet 2018" but still: the PEP wasn't generally accepted as being a fantastic improvement, so why did he feel the need to fight so hard for it?
Interestingly, C++ is going through the same process, with lots of great ideas being proposed, but the sum total of them being an even more complicated language (on top of what is probably the most complicated language already).
Python has been successful, IMHO, because Guido has made several brave, controversial calls. Python 3 breakage and async turned out to be prescient, fantastic decisions.
So you customer, not knowing any better, used whatever was on the machine already. If that's the case, that's really not the Python's community's fault.
The problem was that after 8 years there were still around libraries and frameworks that worked only with Python 2. That's a huge failure. If developers want to keep using the old stuff it means that the new one is either badly designed or badly managed.
Compare it with Ruby. There were big changes from 1.8 to 1.9 (unicode stuff among the others) and again with the 2.x series. The language mostly maintained backward compatibility and we can still write Ruby on 2.5 with the old 1.8 syntax. Community ported libraries and frameworks, started using the new features and all went well.