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

(mail.python.org)
2024 points randlet | 2 comments | 12 Jul 18 15:22 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | 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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1. fgonzag ◴[12 Jul 18 19:52 UTC] No.17518069{3}[source]▶
Bad decision? UTF was Standarized in 1993, python was first released in 1991. You can't decide to use something that hasn't been invented yet. Back then bytes and string were the same thing. Java did do it right but by 1995 the industry had already seen the problems of differing character sets.
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2. coldtea ◴[13 Jul 18 12:07 UTC] No.17522175[source]▶
>Back then bytes and string were the same thing.

No, they weren't. Impossible as it seems, we had encodings (including multi-byte encodings) for decades before UTF.

Python couldn't use UTF-8 in 1991, but it could very well tag strings with a specific encoding, instead of treating them as a bucket of bytes C-style.

>Java did do it right but by 1995 the industry had already seen the problems of differing character sets.

We had seen the problems of "differing character sets" for decades already (Windows vs DOS version of the same language encodings was a classic example for most users, but the problems go back to EBCDIC and so on).

Java just did a more right thing, but we already have a need for generic string types that can handle multiple encodings and know what they contain and how to convert from one to another.