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

Reading that thread is like reading an actual Monty Python plot.

Guido van Rossum has given his life for this language and besides the obligatory 'thanks for all the fish' there isn't even a single person who stops the clock to evaluate what went wrong that they pushed out the person that started this all.

Instead it's 'kthxbye' and they're already dividing up the cake to see who gets to rule.

Not the nicest moment in the history of FOSS, I wonder what kind of a mess will ensue when Linus steps down.

What are they supposed to do? Python is bigger than GvR. A pretty big chunk of the tech industry depends on it. We were probably long past the point where a "BDFL" was healthy --- not because of any moral issue, but because over the long term the market is going to dictate where Python goes and how it grows, and people should stop kidding themselves that it might be otherwise.

I don't think it's at all unseemly that people involved in the Python project respond to GvR's LOA announcement by working out continuity. As someone who has to interact with a lot of Python code professionally, that's exactly the response I'd hope for.

> but because over the long term the market is going to dictate where Python goes and how it grows

The market gave us the absolute mess that is HTML/CSS/Javascript today, so I'm sincerely hoping the Python community will keep agreeing on some greater design principles instead of leaving everything to market forces and pragmatism.

"The market" took over after a long period of "design by committee" that had "strong design principles"[1] resulting in something that was both inadequate for what people wanted to do and didn't evolve at a promising pace (likely because of said principles).

When the market did take over, the problem was that those poor foundations weren't thrown out completely. You can only do so much by strapping turbines on a camel (no offense to camels). At least we can actually write (mediocre) applications with HTML/CSS/JS now.

The other part of the mess is caused by the ever-growing amount of trend-hopping junior developers that want to try out new things - and their superiors letting them do it. If the foundation wasn't so bad, there would be less incentive to try and re-invent anything. Other platforms are fully market-driven, they didn't produce such a mess, because the market rewards stability (hence the low initial adoption rates of Python 3).

[1] https://www.w3.org/People/Bos/CSS-variables