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

(mail.python.org)
2024 points randlet | 3 comments | 12 Jul 18 15:22 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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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symmitchry ◴[12 Jul 18 16:11 UTC] No.17515972[source]▶
I'm a little confused though, by his feelings here. Why did he feel the need to "fight so hard for a PEP" if it was so controversial, and everyone was outraged?

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?

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jnwatson ◴[12 Jul 18 16:25 UTC] No.17516128[source]▶
It was controversial syntax, inline assignment-as-expression. There's always a tension between "keep it simple stupid" and "let's make it better", especially when a large user demographic of Python are non-professional-programmers.

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.

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coldtea[dead post] ◴[12 Jul 18 16:31 UTC] No.17516204[source]▶
>Python 3 breakage and async turned out to be prescient, fantastic decisions.

Async maybe. Python 3 breakage? Did you forgot the /s tag?

ben509 ◴[12 Jul 18 17:10 UTC] No.17516612[source]▶
No, the bad decision was treating bytes and strings interchangeably in the first place. 99% of the hardest to fix breakage was due to that, and it was the right call to pay that price all at once.
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jessaustin ◴[12 Jul 18 17:52 UTC] No.17516995[source]▶
The API in 2 is not optimal, but they fixed it the wrong way. As you know, some operations make sense with bytes, and some make sense with character strings. The operations that make sense with character strings would also make sense with bytes when an encoding is specified. Therefore, there should just be a way of annotating bytes with a suggested encoding. Then byte-oriented packages (e.g. those that deal with data sent over an interface like a socket or pipe) could simply ignore the issue of encoding. Whole classes of errors would just disappear for many python coders. Other coders, who do care about encodings and non-ASCII characters, would still get those errors but that would be OK because they would know how to fix those errors.

So yes some breaking change was indicated, but the particular change that was made was the wrong one.

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1. ubernostrum ◴[12 Jul 18 18:43 UTC] No.17517441{4}[source]▶
Then byte-oriented packages (e.g. those that deal with data sent over an interface like a socket or pipe) could simply ignore the issue of encoding.

Long and bitter experience has shown that people who think they can "simply ignore" the "issue" of encoding actually can't. That mindset is mostly a more polite way of saying "people who assume everything is ASCII all the time, or at most an encoding that always has one byte == one character". Those assumptions break sooner or later. I prefer having them break sooner, because I've been the person who had to clean up the mess at an unpleasant time when it was kicked to "later".

Which in turn means Python 3 made the right choice: text is text and bytes are bytes, and you should never ever pretend bytes are text no matter how much you think you'll never run into a case where the assumption fails.

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2. ◴[12 Jul 18 19:08 UTC] No.17517640[source]▶
3. jessaustin ◴[13 Jul 18 13:38 UTC] No.17522848[source]▶
For lots of applications it doesn't matter how many bytes are in a character, because characters don't matter. Even within a particular application, it's common for characters to only matter in a few particular locations. It would still have been a win for python, to make such applications easier to write and maintain.