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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: 2) by darkfeline on Friday July 13 2018, @09:48PM (1 child)
>There is additional hostility because many of those involve his pet projects (type hints, dataclasses, asyncio, async/await, and a few more)
Most of those aren't his pet projects, they were proposed and implemented by other Python developers.
Most of those were received quite positively, with the exception being asyncio, and to a much lesser extent type hints (vocal minority, there is a lot of people who welcome type hints. MyPy is not a one man project). I can't imagine anyone disliking dataclasses, although I'm sure there's someone out there who can't help being outrages at everything.
And also, Python IS Guido's pet project. It has turned out rather well, all things considered.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 13 2018, @10:22PM
Right, you realize he specifically handed off type hints because he had a vested interest as an author in PEP 484 and many of the rest were pushed by DropBox or PSF sponsors? I included dataclasses for the same reason people don't like them: if you want to use them, you are required to add type hints to your project, which means that if you want to support older versions, you can't as they don't understand the new hints syntax. Similarly, async/await was disliked because they required programmers to change those when they became keywords, make maintenance of packages harder (different versions support different keywords now for asyncio).
I could go on, but the fact of the matter is that these changes (among others) may not be super large and not all that consequential, but they are echos of the whole 2-3 split in the language and many people perceive them as such. They may not break your code and, ultimately, be good things for the language as a whole, but all the users of Python are not necessarily in the "community," let alone active in the mailing list or are a core dev. It isn't surprising that when all the little breaks are taken together, it can appear to some that Python is losing its way.