“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 :-(

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?

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.

> Python 3 breakage and async turned out to be prescient, fantastic decisions.

The jury is still out on the Python 3 decision, to be honest. Heck, Python 2 is still officially supported until 2020.

Python 3 adoption is increasing, but the instability and breakage that it introduced caused a lot of knock-on effects throughout the Python community that held it back and hindered its adoption and mindshare. It'll take a while before we can really say whether the long-term gains will make up for that.

I'll probably never switch for personal use. The print statement change is intolerable to me. It would have cost them nothing to just leave the old syntax in. It's supposed to be a quick and convenient scripting language and they're actively working to make it more verbose and less convenient. I also still don't like not being able to use "string" objects as dumb byte containers, like I do with an IRC bot that doesn't crash with an encoding exception trying to write IRC control characters into a text file. Yes, I know I can work around that wrapping everything up nice and pretty to tell python "this isn't a real string it's okay you don't need to throw an encoding exception ssh." I just don't think that's good design.

Syntax regularity is infinitely more important than scripting convenience.

Button regularity on your keyboard is infinitely more important than ergonomics too, right? Anything but a grid of equally-sized squares must be wrong by virtue of aesthetics. Spoken language too: let's eliminate all contractions because they reduce regularity. Let's also make all the speed limits in the country equal at 20mph, because regularity is infinitely more important than convenience.

You should be supporting return being made into a function too, right? That would be much more regular.

Reminder that a guideline of python was supposed to be "practicality beats purity" which is in stark contrast to the changes to print and strings. [1] Reminds me of the gradual shift of the message on the wall in Animal Farm from "four legs good, two legs bad" to "four legs good, two legs better."

1: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/