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“I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”

(mail.python.org)
2024 points randlet | 4 comments | 12 Jul 18 15:22 UTC | HN request time: 2.334s | source
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bla2 ◴[12 Jul 18 16:02 UTC] No.17515883[source]▶
> 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 :-(

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sjm-lbm ◴[12 Jul 18 16:09 UTC] No.17515955[source]▶
It's PHP and not Python, but every time I read something like this from a major open source figure, I always think of this old PHP mailing list thread:

https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=50696

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raverbashing ◴[12 Jul 18 16:32 UTC] No.17516216[source]▶
"This is going to cause us MONTHS or fixing code for no real benefit since this behavior change is arbitrary and seemingly, was made for no reason"

Yeah, tough. Fix your code

That's the attitude some maintainers need in cutting unreasonable requests.

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ashelmire ◴[12 Jul 18 16:48 UTC] No.17516395[source]▶
It's hilarious because it's literally a one-liner that Rasmus provided for him.
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sjm-lbm ◴[12 Jul 18 16:54 UTC] No.17516460[source]▶
It's more hilarious because his response to that (basically, "this is tax software so there will be a lot of QA when we make that change") is at least sort of legitimate, but only because his accounting software evidently only works due to undefined corner cases in the underlying platform, and that's just ... wow.
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justinator ◴[12 Jul 18 17:19 UTC] No.17516692[source]▶
I was on the side of the person giving the - I think fairly legit., bug until I came to, "tax software in php" and then I realized there's nothing really black and white in this world.
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1. ScottBurson ◴[12 Jul 18 18:31 UTC] No.17517330[source]▶
Did you catch the part about "it makes you lose faith in the product"? ROFL
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2. justinator ◴[12 Jul 18 19:37 UTC] No.17517920[source]▶
I caught the part about, "we have unitialized variables being passed everywhere which should be numbers" and that code, well, smells.

I think the PHP team changing the return value of a function without putting anything in a changelog is a Very Bad Idea and a dev. should be pretty upset about that. Saying that the main dev. is doing this work as a charitable thing is fairly misleading as well.

Buuuuut, I also think passing an unitialized value like that is already a bug in this context given the type of software being created. I'd rather see, "NULL" found wherever than know that it was magically changed to 0 (like they would prefer). I know the dev. said that this is just a formatting thing, but I'll wager they're using formatted numbers for some sort of calculation (inadvertently or not).

Whatever is going on, I hope there was a huge code review and a massive QA effort ( which I also doubt happened), because this is a textbook example of tech debt and the loan shark has come a-knockin'.

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3. ScottBurson ◴[12 Jul 18 21:03 UTC] No.17518587[source]▶
I agree with this as far as it goes, but I think @zaphar has the better answer: a tax app should never have been written in PHP to begin with.

There's a fundamental quandary in language design: accessibility to novice programmers and suitability for serious work are in opposition. Novices, being novices, are unable to appreciate this problem.

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4. justinator ◴[12 Jul 18 21:20 UTC] No.17518712{3}[source]▶
Oh dude: absolutely agreed on that.