SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
On a python developers' mailing list for the core developers, Python Committers, Benevolent Dictator for Life Guido van Rossum has announced that he is stepping down effective immediately and with out appointing a successor.
Now that PEP 572 is done, I don't ever want to have to fight so hard for a
PEP and find that so many people despise my decisions.I would like to remove myself entirely from the decision process. I'll
still be there for a while as an ordinary core dev, and I'll still be
available to mentor people -- possibly more available. But I'm basically
giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL, and you all will be on
your own.After all that's eventually going to happen regardless -- there's still
that bus lurking around the corner, and I'm not getting younger... (I'll
spare you the list of medical issues.)I am not going to appoint a successor.
[...] I'll still be here, but I'm trying to let you all figure something out for
yourselves. I'm tired, and need a very long break.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 13 2018, @06:25PM (1 child)
Noooo, that's like giving a three year old a tube of superglue and a box containing multiple tubs of glitter....sure, the surface results are ever so shiny, but underneath? and the resultant clean up operations?....yech!
Well, BASIC was never really my cup of tea, I cut my programming teeth on assembler, (though ISTR there was a version available on the DECSYSTEM-20 which was fun in a lets-crash-the-system-with-this kind of way..so I'm old enough for a great grandpa appellation) and there's probably a bunch of BBC BASIC programmers out there in their bath chairs, wheeling their way towards thee at this very minute all of a mind to strongly disagree with you on your point above.
For what it's worth, in my view, compared to BASIC, it's a hell of lot easier for programmers, beginners or otherwise, to make abstruse and pernicious coding errors in Python which can then lie hidden for years just waiting for their 5 minutes of fame, and despite the code being installed and in use on tens of thousands of computers globally, these errors never being spotted (ah, the smell of randomly corrupted Berkeley DB files in the morning...how I miss them!..we never did find the borked section of Python code responsible, so as a matter of expediency wrote a bit of Perl to watchdog the db files and fix them when they went titsup, thereby making the fixing of the Python code SEFP).
Easiest (and most profitable) consultancy job I've ever had? back in the '90s converting 20 BASIC programs (which started off life running on a mainframe back in the 60's) into a form which would compile properly in Turbo Basic and pass the test datasets checks, it was a bit of a revelation that not all 'business critical' financial code was written in COBOL.
It frightens me some mornings to think that they might still be out there, being used in anger, running in a DOS VM somewhere..
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday July 16 2018, @02:10PM
For their own three-year-old project, why is that so bad?
I'm not saying give a low skilled programmer a tool so that they can do something important and mission critical.
I mean, for example, how many Excel Power Users could benefit from, say, Python, or Julia?
Universal health care is so complex that only 32 of 33 developed nations have found a way to make it work.