“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.

I think Javascript has been rapidly getting better, as a language. Every time you hear a front end dev complain about having to support IE, consider that an endorsement of the way HTML/CSS/Javascript has been improving. No one is complaining about having to use the latest version of Javascript to support the new Chrome.