“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.

Python 3 implementation was a step in the right direction, but the decision to allow the old language co co-exist with the new one and to break backwards compatibility between the two (for instance 'print') in places where it didn't need to break makes no sense to me.

A lot of goodwill got burned with that.