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

Excluding the 2/3 debacle, Guido has overseen an incredible progression in Python. It has become a contemporary lingua franca for coding, and the concept of a “pythonic” approach has been hugely influential.

I’m disappointed that he broke Eric Raymond’s rule: “When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.”

The email sounds bitter, which is tremendously sad, and I hope that after a break Guido will be able to oversee a more constructive transition.

My guess for lack of successor is that he doesn't want to burden someone else. It's probably one of those things like being a head of state where you don't really know what it's like until you've done it yourself. So people that want to be Python maintainer do so because they don't know what they're asking for.