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

> 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 :-(

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

"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.

It's hilarious because it's literally a one-liner that Rasmus provided for him.

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.

One of the hidden costs when you elect to use a language like PHP in the early 00's is that as they fix the glaring issues in their language and stdlib you will be incurring a continuing maintenance cost.

It's a combination of your choice to pick PHP and their choice to fix the languages warts colliding.

It may even have been a reasonable choice for reasons of time to market, hiring, and other business related factors. But the conflict in this thread highlighted that whoever chose PHP in the beginning did not factor in this hidden cost when he made his choice. The results of that lack of information were predictable.