I have really horrible memories of trying to keep a Plone site in prod from my sysadmin days.

Yes thank you Guido! I started working with python back in 1999 working with zope, now we live in a much easier world where you have many options to deploy python applications, my boss wound up rejecting my project but working with python was just as amazing in 99 as it is today its just so much easier you can see all the work and more importantly love that has been put into the language since its inception. Thanks again Guido for all your amazing work!

I&#x27;m also really sad to see him go. I sincerely hope Guido enjoys his well earned time off. I&#x27;m extremely grateful for the amazing community he has fostered around his excellent language.Though as an avid Python user (~10 years), this does fill me with concern. Not only for Guido&#x27;s health, but for the health of the language. Guido leaves awfully big shoes to fill, and I&#x27;m hoping the community is up for the challenge.

It is sad but needs to happen with every BDFL, I really like the tone of the email and I am sure the python core devs would figure out something. :)Finally, Guido if you are reading this, thanks for everything you have done for the language and especially the community behind it. I partly owe loving what I do to you. Hope taking this break would help you be happier.

Is the final syntax := surrounded by parenthesis?

I had the same gut reaction when I heard the PEP even exists. 
 But now I actually read the PEP, it&#x27;s very well written and makes a reasonably good case that in specific scenarios it will be an improvement.(My second gut reaction was it should have used `as NAME` postfix syntax. The PEP debunks that too. Turns out it previously proposed that and the switch to := was a major improvement :-)The bigger question is whether the gains justify making the language larger... That&#x27;s subjective, impossible to settle by debate, and the kind of thing a BDFL can help decide one way or the other :-)

Yeesh, that’s a sad thing to burn out over. Python made this decision to avoid assignment expressions a long time ago and has done fine without this capability. Why not just leave well enough alone? Adding a new variation to assignment syntax (just because of the opinion that = vs == is too confusing (even though C and Ruby and many other languages deal with it fine)) is just going to add more confusion to the language. For a line saved here and there?

&gt;Now that PEP 572 is done, I don&#x27;t ever want to have to fight so hard for a
PEP and find that so many people despise my decisions.PEP 572: Python assignment expressions has been accepted<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17448439" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17448439</a>

The python idea mailing list scaled very poorly for getting proposals into python.It&#x27;s a harsh confusing place and the absence of tooling and structure doesn&#x27;t help.

Assignment expressions in Python, it seems.

The first sentence of the email mentions PEP 572, and the third paragraph mentions his age (van Rossum is 62).

That&#x27;s not an accurate summary of assignment expressions.Assignment expressions perform the assignment and also return the value of the assignment. So you can assign and test a conditional at the same time. It&#x27;s quite an elegant alternative to some quite verbose repetitive code you would otherwise have to write in some scenarios.

&gt; (a := b)Will `with` start using this syntax instead of `b as a`: `with open(&#x27;foo&#x27;) as a:` == `with a := open(&#x27;foo&#x27;):`?Update: found my answer on the pep. `with EXPR as VAR` actually calls `EXPR.__enter__()` so it&#x27;s not the same.

Damn dude...I&#x27;m sick and tired of writing stuff likem = f( &lt;...&gt; )if m:<pre><code> # do stuff with m
</code></pre>
Trivial as it may be, I for one welcome this.

&gt; (a := b) rather than a = bThat&#x27;s not it at all. The PEP even acknowledges that while `(a := b)` would be valid, it would not be recommended.

(a := b) rather than a = bNaturally people went to the barricades for it, in a classic example of bikeshedding and Wadler&#x27;s Law (programmers will fight to the death over trivial syntax disagreements and just shrug at profound changes to semantics and architecture)

What was the issue that was evidently so contentious that it made him wish to step down?

That&#x27;s a good read. I feel like the &quot;customer is always right&quot; mentality does quite a bit of harm to OSS support.Also reminds me of that dev (who I can&#x27;t seem to search up) who had their email printed as part of a open-source software license in a car manual and would get ridiculous email from people who had car trouble.

OMG there are some real gems in that thread.&gt; Escalate? Oh how I wish I had someone to escalate to. - rasmus@php.net&gt; After carefully reviewing this bug report with our board of directors on 4chan, we have come to the conclusion that your &quot;rusty C skills&quot; should be enough to fix the issue.
I would therefore like to remind you that rasmus@php.net is <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Rasmus_lerdorf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Rasmus_lerdorf</a>

&quot;This is going to cause us MONTHS or fixing code for no real benefit since this behavior change is arbitrary and seemingly, was made for no reason&quot;Yeah, tough. Fix your codeThat&#x27;s the attitude some maintainers need in cutting unreasonable requests.

O_o I wonder how many times I&#x27;ve spoken to someone and didn&#x27;t realize who it was&#x2F;how important they were because of the anonymity of the internet.

I&#x27;m sure &#x27;endosquid.com&#x27; is currently being by hammered by people wanting to find out who was so rude and unreasonable.

found prior HN discussion: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=4145179" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=4145179</a>

Archive:<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;XYXoi" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;XYXoi</a>

I have yet to encounter any user so hostile in my open source projects, thankfully. But when the time arises, the line I have prepared is:<pre><code> I&#x27;m really sorry you ran into this issue. To make things better,
 I&#x27;ve given you a full refund.</code></pre>

It&#x27;s PHP and not Python, but every time I read something like this from a major open source figure, I always think of this old PHP mailing list thread:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugs.php.net&#x2F;bug.php?id=50696" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugs.php.net&#x2F;bug.php?id=50696</a>

It was controversial syntax, inline assignment-as-expression. There&#x27;s always a tension between &quot;keep it simple stupid&quot; and &quot;let&#x27;s make it better&quot;, especially when a large user demographic of Python are non-professional-programmers.Interestingly, C++ is going through the same process, with lots of great ideas being proposed, but the sum total of them being an even more complicated language (on top of what is probably the most complicated language already).Python has been successful, IMHO, because Guido has made several brave, controversial calls. Python 3 breakage and async turned out to be prescient, fantastic decisions.

Every feature ends up being controversial. Every discussion ends up devolving, somewhere, with some group, into bikeshedding.Ultimately, it&#x27;s up to certain stakeholders to hear arguments and make calls.

That&#x27;s the very point of a bdfl : it assumes he knows better than others. Debating is for insight and cortesy, not mandatory.

If &#x27;everyone&#x27; was outraged, it wouldn&#x27;t have been controversial, right? I&#x27;d argue that one person against _everyone_ else isn&#x27;t a controversy, but in any case at the end of the day the PEP was accepted in a democratic poll.

He fought for it because he thought it was the right call. The role of a BDFL is to make those kinds of calls for the benefit of the language and community. It&#x27;s really tough to fight the &quot;tyranny of the majority&quot; and go with what you think is right versus what everyone is screaming and yelling at you about.

I&#x27;m a little confused though, by his feelings here. Why did he feel the need to &quot;fight so hard for a PEP&quot; if it was so controversial, and everyone was outraged?I do understand people&#x27;s points about &quot;the age of outrage&quot; and &quot;internet 2018&quot; but still: the PEP wasn&#x27;t generally accepted as being a fantastic improvement, so why did he feel the need to fight so hard for it?

In 2018, we can finally use our advances in data science and social network design to precisely target outrage and make it maximally engaging.

On a related note, we&#x27;ve always had the constant outrage, its the internet that allowed it to become more apparent.

I noticed this over the years on a forum I’ve run for over 10 years. Since ads are pretty much dead for small publishers like me, the forum costs me money. But I run it out of charity.Nothing sucks the energy out of me more than lurking in my forum and seeing users complain about how little I’ve done for the forum. I don’t want to know how many weekend I’ve spent building features for the forum or arbitrating problems between users.The thing is that these posts of entitlement are a relatively knew phenomenon on my forum mostly in crescendo over the last four years.I’m pretty sensitive to it now and it’s easy to spot eveywhere. From people whining that free shit isn’t perfect on HN to gamers complaining that a modder charges for the mod instead of doing it for fun.

Completely agree with you. Heck I realized I have the same entitlement issue after running into 2-3 people who were on higher spectrum of entitlement. I was having issue with their behavior but realized I do the same sometimes. I am trying to balance it out. The sad thing is people are not even aware that they have this issue.I think social media is responsible for breeding this sense of entitlement among people.

It&#x27;s not the outrage, it&#x27;s the entitlement.  People have always been outraged, the major difference I&#x27;ve seen is the rampant sense of entitlement.  I&#x27;m not sure if it&#x27;s a result of bad parenting or something else, but it&#x27;s slowly becoming a major issue for the entirety of the human race.

&gt; this age of constant outrageAnd entitlement.

What I think would fix this, is better developer metrics and statistics. If every post to the python-dev list was automatically tagged with some sort of metric for that persons contributions to the project, it would go a long way to identifying, and triaging, the most violent vitriol.Something like code contributions, amount of churn, speed of implementation, level of correctness, etc. Trouble is, I don&#x27;t really see any quick &quot;just insert batteries&quot; method of adding such metrics to an open-source programming community - perhaps someone knows of a great system of reports for measuring developer productivity through a repo or something? I guess it would also have to accommodate dev-ops and marketing efforts by developers, too. Hmm .. maybe this is a startup idea in the making ..

Denizens... please. I was clearly facetious.Too deadpan.

Outrageous. I’m offended, because I see open source as a great force for change, and I find your remarks belittling.

&gt; I don&#x27;t ever want to have to fight so hard for a
PEP and find that so many people despise my decisions.Leading a large open source project must be terrible in this age of constant outrage :-(

Wow, this is the end of an era! Guido has had an extraordinary impact on the direction of Python and software engineering more generally, and I thank him for his contributions.

It’s journalistic, but is not misleading. “[python-committers] Transfer of power - Guido van Rossum” would be more verbatim, but I think the title is okay.

Quote from the text used to be the most common type of editorializing to be reverted&#x2F;disallowed before...
And at any rate, I said it could be for the better - I&#x27;ve just been noticing this more and more.

It&#x27;s a direct quote from the email. Do you think it was taken out of context in a way that communicates editorial intent? Seems pretty directly connected to the contents of the message to me.

It&#x27;s very often the mods who editorialize (often you can see some reasoning in the comments), so it is definitely not an issue of them not knowing, rather a change of policy.

When you see them, let the mods know via the Contact link in the footer. They don&#x27;t see everything and update the ones they know about.

I expect that has little or nothing to do with dang and a lot more to do with the increased population of HN users.

It makes a LOT more sense than &quot;Transfer of Power&quot; does.

Moderators updated the title from the submitted “Transfer of Power (Guido Stepping Down as Python BDFL)” to this representative quotation from the article. The guidelines ask for the original title unless it&#x27;s misleading or clickbait, and the original title in this case is borderline by being vague. This isn&#x27;t a change in policy, but this is a case that probably could go either way.

I got to say, HN has become much looser with the titles since dang took over. It could be for the better (or not), but I definitely see at least 5 top posts a week with an editorialized title now, compared to a lot less before.Edit: Everyone is saying it is fine. Again I&#x27;m not saying it is not, but if it is, can you please update this part of the guidelines:&gt;Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait. Don&#x27;t editorialize.

His email made it pretty clear he doesn’t care how things move forward as it’s now up to the community to decide.

That is a really interesting point. Without some process formalizing his (desired it appears) removal as BDFL he could override any future construct that is built to guide python. The thought of a schism in the direction of python is worrying.Edited to remove inadvertent backhanded compliment

Have you tried reaching software engineers on vacation?  “Sorry I’ll be camping on some rock on Mars where I’ll have spotty internet access so....”

 But he is still the BDFL, he&#x27;s just on permanent vacation.

Also it&#x27;s &#x27;BD&#x27;Maybe he should have pushed harder on his Royal Prerogative to move things forwards

Sorry Guido but it’s BDFL — for LIFE! Just kidding and Thanks Guido for all you’ve done for the Python community.

you&#x27;re missing a body that can decide in case of implementation disputes over the other two. we could even compare it to a court. since python is so huge, we would have several levels for triaging and appeals. and the top one would reign supreme.

Maybe we&#x27;ll try something like a triumvirate? As best I can tell there are basically three areas where Python is dominant: web, data science, and academia. A single leader for each of those spheres could form a council where BDFL-level decisions could be made by fiat.Each community could then form whatever organization they felt necessary to choose who to send to the triumvirate.As as check on the power of the triumvirate, we could have something like a &quot;Tribune of the Plebs&quot; - a representative elected by open election from the entire community that holds veto authority over changes approved by the triumvirate.

&quot;Apple lives on with only memories of Steve Jobs.&quot;I think that remains to be seen.

He&#x27;s going to sit under his own vine and fig tree :)

Guido is only human. And one day, he will die. (Hopefully a long, long time from now.)Guido is not asking Python to live without a dictator. Guido is asking Python to learn how to live without Guido, so that Python may outlive him.This is a tale as old as time. Apple lives on with only memories of Steve Jobs. The United States lives on with only memories George Washington.For some inspiration I&#x27;d recommend listening to the track &quot;One Last Time&quot; from the Hamilton musical:&quot;One Last Time&quot; - Hamilton At The White House #ObamaLegacy
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=uV4UpCq2azs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=uV4UpCq2azs</a>Original Broadway Cast Recording on YouTube
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=pEqnXNsAFL8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=pEqnXNsAFL8</a>Original Broadway Cast Recording on Spotify
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;open.spotify.com&#x2F;track&#x2F;0Iys022UwQ8xBfxE1g4nWZ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;open.spotify.com&#x2F;track&#x2F;0Iys022UwQ8xBfxE1g4nWZ</a>

Yikes. Python has become so hugely popular and is used for so many different use cases that I fear the ecosystem is going to really struggle to find consistency and direction without a dictator.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lwn.net&#x2F;Articles&#x2F;757713&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lwn.net&#x2F;Articles&#x2F;757713&#x2F;</a>

Se discussion previously on HN: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17448439" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17448439</a>

Can someone paraphrase why PEP 572 was disliked by so many people?

I think that having strong opinions on how others should be developing software is how communities become toxic like this.&quot;Shooting yourself in the foot is your fault for not using a linter that detects accidental misuse of assignment!&quot;

Not having a problem in the first place is preferable to fighting it with tools. == vs = is a classic mistake that I&#x27;m sure every C programmer has wasted some time on. (I&#x27;m just undecided if I prefer dealing with this very problem occasionally, or choosing either of the verbosity of := assignments or the non-orthogonality of = assignment statements plus := assignment expressions.)

What do you do if you really do intend the assignment?(Assume for the sake of argument it’s some more reasonable example like &quot;if (x = re_match(foo, bar)) {...}&quot;)

Warnings in Python are very rare, and only for good reasonsThrowing warnings for &quot;common code&quot; would be uncharacteristic.

&gt; The problem with the C-style of assignments is that it leads to this classic error: if(x = 0) {...}yeah, if you code on 20 years old compilers with no warnings. GCC 4.1 warns about this (with -Wall) and Clang 3.4 warns about this too, without any warning flag.

&gt; Well, when he is dealing with arguments as silly as &quot;but we will confuse = with ==)...You clearly never had exposure to a PHP codebase. If people can trip up, people will trip up.

Guido (along with most core devs) are actively against c-style assignment. This pep was a compromise that Guido felt was good.But c-style assignment in Python was never going to happen, not should it have.

My reaction was the opposite -- I didn&#x27;t know about PEP572, read it immediately after this retirement announcement.  My response was, &quot;where has this feature been all these years?&quot;  I&#x27;m delighted by the addition -- it removes a lot of &quot;loop and a half&quot; ugliness without adding do loops, it simplifies list comprehensions, it lets you remove opportunities to make mistakes, and it doesn&#x27;t let you put a single-equals assignment inside a conditional as a typo.

Well, when he is dealing with arguments as silly as &quot;but we will confuse = with ==) it&#x27;s not a surprise he is tired and had enough. I just wish he had pushed through C style assignment before retiring. New syntax is ugly and introduces a new operator which basically does the same thing. When I&#x27;ve seen this PEP for the first time I thought he lost his touch after so many fantastic design decisions throughout the years. Now I realize he just had enough.Thanks Guido for fantastic language. I wouldn&#x27;t find love for programming if it wasn&#x27;t for you.

Background (&quot;PEP 572 and decision-making in Python&quot;):<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lwn.net&#x2F;Articles&#x2F;757713&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lwn.net&#x2F;Articles&#x2F;757713&#x2F;</a>

Python hasn&#x27;t changed much, but the world around it has. For better or worse, when jobs in the language were few and far between, it was a friendlier and less competitive community.

People often don&#x27;t realize this. We hear a lot that python is moving too fast or too slow. To say that disregard the delicate balance the language had to dance on for 20 years. It&#x27;s crazy.

&gt; Perhaps that was the second scraper.I believe that is the case yes. However correct me if m wrong.

Wasn&#x27;t the first Google scraper written in Java? I saw an old Usenet post by Page from about 1997 asking about user agents in Java.Perhaps that was the second scraper.

That’s what he said :-) (first google scraper = scraper used in original google implementation)

&gt;Fun fact, I believe the very first google scraper was written in it.Fun &quot;fact&quot;: I need to check my facts, but it could be that the very first Google was written it it, too :)Checked:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.co.in&#x2F;search?q=what+language+was+google+search+engine+first+written+in" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.co.in&#x2F;search?q=what+language+was+google+s...</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Google_Search" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Google_Search</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;History_of_Google" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;History_of_Google</a>

Even though I write python only if it’s going to be like 200 loc tops, it’s insane how gracefully the language has aged. It came out in 91, thus predating for example Java. Fun fact, I believe the very first google scraper was written in it.At the same time I can’t wait for the next language to replace it.

For what it&#x27;s worth, the variant of syntax Guido pushed is a really good choice and the fact that the mailing list &quot;widely opposed&quot; it only tells of the participants.This is just my personal opinion.

Am I mistaken for not considering this PEP (and all PEPs in general) as strongly backed by Guido? I always assumed they were sort of design-by-committee and that he approved of some more than others. Offline, in private, I&#x27;ve been pretty critical of the change, but to me it was just another PEP.

One of the pycon keynotes (by Brett Cannon) was on civility in open source:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;tzFWz5fiVKU?t=2785" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;tzFWz5fiVKU?t=2785</a>If you&#x27;re a little abrasive (as I am) then I recommend giving it a watch. There&#x27;s nothing wrong with being right but you don&#x27;t want to jeopardize the respect and community by not recognizing others in a response.

And even if there were no other reasons for adopting codes of conduct, that would be reason enough.

Open source burnout is real. I&#x27;m sure the allure of giving back by creating something useful fades when people constantly criticize your work, especially when you look at the personal and professional sacrifices you&#x27;re making to produce free software.

He did a good work -- got it where it is now.But he also had some specific stickups with some features -- like closures for example.

A rough consensus is trivially observable. Look around. Who&#x27;s left saying that plan Foo is a bad idea? Just that one guy who is a total crank and thinks Python shouldn&#x27;t support 64-bit processors? Nobody cares about him. How about people who think plan Foo is a good idea? Basically everybody who talked about it other than the crank: OK, that&#x27;s rough consensus.If you have situations where your &quot;bunch of people with commit access&quot; aren&#x27;t sure if there&#x27;s consensus then you don&#x27;t have a consensus.As to why you need it: Because unlike countries people have a real choice. All your language users are volunteers. (No &quot;Seasteading&quot; and &quot;Freemen on the land&quot; are not real choices). Not only can they freely choose another language instead of Python, they can fork Python and go make their own instead, or maintain the current code frozen in perpetuity.Now, if there really is a 50:50 split between people who must have feature X and people who&#x27;ll leave if feature X is added to Python, nothing you can do will solve that. So it&#x27;s wrong to try to design your structures for that problem. More often there is a third way, and consensus helps you to be sure you found the third way.

Who decides when there&#x27;s rough consensus or broad acceptance for a change? You have a bunch of people with commit access to the python repository; of course you need some mechanism to decide what goes in.Rough consensus is what you need here.Why?

Consensus approaches are terrible ways to design languages. It&#x27;s why Java took so long to evolve, where C# rapidly adapted to changing needs; and why C++ lingered in a long state of crappiness until Stroustroup came back and is now pushing improvements every three years.Languages generally do well when there is a sense of leadership and vision for where it is going. Consensus is terrible at providing both.

Guido&#x27;s question gets to the heart of the problem:&quot;So what are you all going to do? Create a democracy? Anarchy? A dictatorship? A federation?&quot;No. None of the above. These are mechanisms which make choices when a choice must be made, even if none of the options is broadly acceptable. An appropriate mechanism for, say, governing a country.Python isn&#x27;t a country, it&#x27;s just a programming language, so when there aren&#x27;t any popular options _doing nothing_ is always the backstop. Does that mean that maybe, eventually, your programming language will shrivel away and become irrelevant? Yeah, it does. But again, not a country, just a programming language, use a different one.Rough consensus is what you need here. PEP 572 never had rough consensus. Could it have obtained such consensus, someday, perhaps, with more work? Maybe, though I doubt it. But it didn&#x27;t have that when the PEP was rammed through by the Benevolent Dictator.

Even though I am hardwired to C and &#x27;thinking like a machine would&#x2F;prefers&#x27;, python was probably the first and only language I didn&#x27;t feel like it was a programming language at all. Always when I write something in it, it&#x27;s always &#x27;huh, and that&#x27;s it? I&#x27;m... done?&#x27;. Sure, it&#x27;s equal part due to language and &#x27;batteries&#x27;, but neither would happen without GvR and awesome community that built around his project and him. Python, to me, is like lisp without parens and with  libraries - the future we were promised. Only thing I, personally, can&#x27;t do is write large(er&#x2F;ish) codebases with it. I tend to get lost, but that&#x27;s probably due to my C-like brain. In any case, thanks for everything!

I totally agree with this. In 1999 I had only used C and shell (well lisp a little bit in college), and python was such a breath of fresh air...

I haven&#x27;t used Python in many years, but it was the first programming language I really could say I loved. Everything was was either completely in tune with my intuition or well-documented.I had a lot of fun with Python, and I learned a lot about programming by (ab)using it. I am very grateful to Guido van Rossum and the work he has done, and I wish him all the best for his future.

I honestly don&#x27;t understand why it&#x27;s so contentious, despite reading the lwn.net article about it[1]. It just looks like some syntactic sugar to me, and I&#x27;ve been in the position where not having that sugar has felt awkward many times writing python.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lwn.net&#x2F;Articles&#x2F;757713&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lwn.net&#x2F;Articles&#x2F;757713&#x2F;</a>

As someone who used Python for more than a decade, a few months ago when I saw PEP 572 and that Guido liked it I knew that it would be by far the most controversial one ever.And I was very concerned that there was no outside community involvement. This is one where there should have been a lot of publicity around, and the community should have been asked (on r&#x2F;python, r&#x2F;programming, HN, ...)It&#x27;s sad to see this, but it&#x27;s not surprising to me. In general the Python community at large accepted Guido&#x27;s decisions, but this one was too much of a shock, and when the python-dev discussions where so heated, you can only imagine the response from outside.

Thanks Guido, for building my favorite language.

Try solving social problems without technology.

Wasn&#x27;t it nice that you could reply to this comment over the web rather than physically going to the commenter and telling them what you thought? Boy, this technology sure gave a helpful assist to the social problem of communication.

The decisions that are made by the social group can be recorded with technology. The actions the group is capable of taking can be handed over to the technology. Thus, the ability to take those actions can be mechanically resolved.Have your debate in email, but then VOTE in a way that can be automated.

Because I don&#x27;t want an individual (or small group of individuals) to have authoritarian power (BDFL) over a repo.It&#x27;s the governance of the repo that I want encoded. I make a pull request, and it&#x27;s decided upon by the government system.That needs to be encoded into Github.And yes, &quot;the very diverse governance models&quot; is a challenge. One I think needs to be taken up, eventually.I don&#x27;t want one jerk to have the ability to ruin a repo. I don&#x27;t want to have to fork a repo when the one owner dies. When I disagree with the owner of a repo, I&#x27;d like a process to resolve it.

Why Github? It&#x27;s like begging your electrical company to institute rules for how multi-tenant building is governed. Github is just a (admittedly major) infrastructure provider, they are not and should not be in business of enforcing governance in open-source communities, which have very diverse governance models and it&#x27;s great.

<pre><code> &gt; Why is representative democracy the best system for managing a repo?
</code></pre>
The most obvious reason (to me) is that it&#x27;s sort of preposterous to think that all votes are equal. I&#x27;ve never even used Python. Should my vote be worth the same as Guido&#x27;s when it comes to some technical decision? This is a problem in representative democracies as well, of course, but you&#x27;ve a little more protection.There&#x27;s also the issue of practicality. Voting on issues is a time and resource intensive process. It&#x27;s just impractical to have everybody vote directly on every single decision.<pre><code> &gt; Can I fork your socialist utopia and form an authoritarian dictatorship?
</code></pre>
Well, of course!<pre><code> &gt; I don’t see why this system would ever be beneficial to a real world government.
</code></pre>
I can&#x27;t think of a less viable equivalency than attempting to equate a system government to an open source project&#x27;s management model.- Nations have many orders of magnitude more resources than... Python- Practically speaking the vast majority of people can belong to only a single nation, whereas most developers probably used a handful of languages in the last 24h- Nobody asked to be born into a country, and most people on Earth can&#x27;t simply choose a new one- The decisions made by nations are literally life and death for millions of peopleThe relevant factors for determining the course of Python&#x27;s governance model bear far more resemblance to your neighborhood restaurant&#x27;s menu decisions than the ways in which governments are elected.

It&#x27;s one popular way, that&#x27;s all. There are plenty of others that could make sense.A game could grant you the ability to edit its source code, after you complete the game. That&#x27;s just a for-instance.&gt; Will there also be an option for pure democracy?Sure, why not?&gt; Can I fork your socialist utopia and form an authoritarian dictatorship?Mechanically, sure. There may be licensing problems, but that&#x27;s true today.&gt; I don’t see why this system would ever be beneficial to a real world government.If the real world government stores its web pages in GitHub, then the real world government can use this governance to handle changes to that web page.Rather than letting a lone IT admin have root.&gt; What’s the benefit?If you&#x27;re comfortable with needing to fork a repo when the BDFL goes rogue and starts making changes you hate, then there&#x27;s no benefit at all.

Why is representative democracy the best system for managing a repo? Will there also be an option for pure democracy?Can I fork your socialist utopia and form an authoritarian dictatorship?I don’t see why this system would ever be beneficial to a real world government. We already have checks and balances, if GitHub did it all who decides how GitHub works? What’s the benefit?

You can implement it already with the GitHub API. If you do, please run it on itself.

I&#x27;ve begged GitHub to institute forms of government for repos.For X action to happen, Y percent of the pool of people in the Z list need to approve it.Membership of the Z list is granted when W percent of the T pool approve it.Modifying the rules of government of this repo can only happen when L percent of the R pool approve it.And on and on...I could imagine a city or state government actually having its laws encoded in Github, and Github itself enforces the governmental system of checks and balances. Congress. Senate. President. Veto. Overriding a Veto. Laws of succession. Elections. On and on.

Don’t know why you are being downvoted. Linus’s tirades and diatribes are famous for how brutally personal they get. I still maintain that they are a waste of time and he would be a more effective leader if he limited his responses to “this is a bad idea” or “this isn’t done right” instead of writing pages long personal attacks on other members of the project.

Maybe this is the reason that the certain other BDFL is still in service? Maybe it&#x27;s part of psycho-hygiene in order to be able to continue? I sincerely don&#x27;t know - your question just triggered my experience when working in psychiatry and seeing how the staff was venting, talking and joking about patients - once the doors were closed. I was very shocked, was quite young, around 20 when serving - but one of the doctors, when she saw my shock, took me apart and explained that this behaviour, so shocking it might be when seeing it for the first time, is part of psycho-hygiene that allows the people to be able to continue to work and keep a certain distance.Sure, it&#x27;s not the same, but I am questioning myself, if for these roles, like the BDFLs we are talking about, it is not necessary to have a personal way that allows to handle all the pressure, still keeping being yourself, defending your vision of your life-work.

&gt;It&#x27;s amazing he managed to not explode at somebody.Like a certain other BDFL occasionally does?

&gt;Good writers, comedians or directors know when to quit at the top their carreer.Actually, no. I know this is getting away from the main point of the discussion a bit. But Adam Savage gave a good explanation as to why most paid people quit at the height of their career [1]. The idea is that once people pass their prime, the work they produce is worth less. So the only way such careers could continue would be for producers to overpay for a product, or for the actors to continue working just as hard for less money.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=sGeS6m3hVk8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=sGeS6m3hVk8</a>

As a personnal note, you could feel that guido was already in this mood for a while from the tone of the last year tickets and mails.It&#x27;s amazing he managed to not explode at somebody. I know i would have if our roles had been reversed in some exchanges we had.Good writers, comedians or directors know when to quit at the top their carreer.I think he is quitting before the situation was too taxing and that is wise and courageous. Espacially since it&#x27;s been more than 2 decades of service.Plus he is leaving his baby.That&#x27;s an amazing move.

The indentation should be almost the same as any other language. Unless you have an aversion to consistent code-style.Python whitespace was only annoying for me years ago when it still had trouble handling tabs and spaces in the same file, and you would run into literally invisible bugs. I haven&#x27;t run into that in a long time, though.

Python has open-braces in the form of colons.  If you use emacs, you can use the PASS statement as a close-brace and everything will auto-indent properly.  Python purists have conniptions when they see this programming style, but I&#x27;ve used it for nearly 20 years and it works for me.

I found Python&#x27;s indentation style more appealing after working with Clojure for a while. Python is a bit like lisp without the parentheses. In fact you can Clojurify Python with Hy (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hylang.org" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hylang.org</a>) which solves both the indentation problem and the crippled lambdas problem.

I used to have a similar aversion to significant whitespace having learned in compiler classes that space should be insignificant. Over time I learned to appreciate the significant indentation though and now I want a C frontend with similar syntax.

&gt; but for me, Lua is just far more elegant,It&#x27;s curious... Lua is my favorite language due to its elegance, but I would love it even more if it used significant indentation (using tabs, of course) instead of &quot;end&quot; blocks.

This is way off topic, but I’ve never seen the word goosebridle - googling it comes up with a phrase a wigwam for a goose’s bridle - and there its usage is meant as a rejoinder meaning “none of your business” - I’m curious how it ended up as a word to mean - I’m guessing - flashy features (jeez now I am sure there is a more common word for that) - is this a local thing, or is the etymology on the web wrong, what I’m saying is I’m curious how your usage of the word came about :)

I can never get into Python and end up with as much passion as you. For me, its a very powerful and useful language - no doubt about it.But the aesthetics of a whitespace language just don&#x27;t jive with my 30+ years of experience writing code. No matter how many times I try over the past few decades, I just can&#x27;t get passionate about writing Python code. I know its power, and I totally grok its value to our industry - but for me, Lua is just far more elegant, even if it doesn&#x27;t ship with all of Pythons&#x27; goosebridles. Lua is my go-to scripting language; I only ever use Python if I have to - i.e. its enforced on me by others.I really do try to get over this personal handicap, often enough, but the moment I have to start thinking about indentation I just lose all the passion and it starts feeling like a drag. What a dilemma, because I know it has been used for many, many great things .. I just wish I could get over my aversion to white-space&#x27;ing things all the time. I&#x27;ve tried editor after editor (well, expect the Python-specific things), but it just doesn&#x27;t click.Ah well.

Python was my first programming language, ~15 years ago. The bracket- and semicolon-free syntax is beautiful and approachable to this day. Python is my go-to for writing data format conversion scripts. I wrote a random sentence generator in Python 10 years ago that gave me and my friends hours of entertainment.Thanks, Guido, for the good times!

What&#x27;s the Pythonic way of pattern matching?

Since there is no metrics for that, your entire post, much like a lot of any part of the language design process, is very opinionated.It&#x27;s why it&#x27;s hard.

Whats the pythonic way to do dependencies? pip? pipenv? virtualenv? pyproject?
And how about Python 2 and 3?&lt;&#x2F;Sarcasm&gt;But seriously, I think there&#x27;s no one way to do things anymore especially if it holds up productivity and effectiveness. Let the pattern matching begin.

You can in fact factor out expressions in list comprehensions, like:<pre><code> [foo(y, y) for x in xs for y in [f(x)]]
</code></pre>
Is this Pythonic? Perhaps not, but mainly because multiline list comprehensions are frowned on in general. I think people tend to get too dogmatic about that.

I think he made a right call blocking all of those. There are Pythonic ways to do all of those already and the mantra there should be one and preferably one way of doing things is important for the philosophy of the language.With PEP 572 it wasn&#x27;t like that. There wasn&#x27;t a Pythonic way to do list comprehensions which used the same expensive to evaluate expression two times in it and it was I think the only glaring syntax weakness in comparison to languages which have a way to do that (like WHERE keyword in Haskell).

Please can we have real lambdas? I&#x27;d then be tempted to prioritise Python over Ruby.

NonononoGod please NO!I would KILL not to make that happen. So many devs abuse those in every language that has that. Even lambas get sometimes abused in Python (and I have a few examples in our codebase unfortunately). Expanding lambdas&#x27; scope is the LAST thing I want in Python, this would just lead to worst codebases, with nearly 0 benefit.If you want to do something that needs 2 expressions, just create a goddamn function and name it for god&#x27;s sake.Sorry but I had to say it, I think the lambda limitations is one of my favorite feature in Python.

I read a long time ago and was convinced that no nice lambdas was one of the biggest problems in python, but that poster argued convincingly that it&#x27;s an unavoidable consequence of the meaningful whitespace. Are you proposing a special syntax for multiple statements on one line for this?

The big one I want to see, because it&#x27;s one of my biggest frustrations with Python, is to finally make lambdas work like every other contemporary language instead of being inexplicably limited to a single expression simply because Guido couldn&#x27;t come up with a syntax that agreed with him.There&#x27;s so many cases (arguably including the problem this PEP was designed to solve!) where having a real inline closure is just far more readable than having to arbitrarily break every single thing that happens to need 2+ expressions out into named blocks out of sequence.Other things in Python are either simply a result of the language&#x27;s age and history, or have real technical pros and cons, but that one irks me because it&#x27;s an artificial limitation chosen for no reason except aesthetics.

It&#x27;s going to be very interesting to see if things like:- pattern matching- inline exception catching- path inclusion in the built in- more functional tooling- lazy keyworsThat were BDFL-blocked, will go back to be debated in the mailing list in the next months.And if yes, will the community stands by its root or create a new era ?The consequences of which we will only really see in 10 years.Guido as done an incredible job at being the boogie man, keeping the language simple and readable. It&#x27;s a hard job.Can we pull it off ?

Thank you for your hard work Guido. Python is one of the nicest programming languages to work with and will continue to thrive in the years to come.

I think had it been a more clear demarcation, like this, Perl 5 would be in much better shape today. Perl 5 has been doing well for a few years now, but it took a while for the Perl 5 developer community to fill the void left by Larry; there just wasn&#x27;t an acknowledgment that there was a void to fill. Larry didn&#x27;t die, still kinda paid attention to Perl 5 for a while, but his heart wasn&#x27;t in it and his attention eventually shifted fully to Perl 6.Now, the Perl Pumpking (a sort of Benevolent Punching Bag for the Next Release; they do have the ability to decide which patches go in, but usually don&#x27;t wield it like a dictator) along with the dev community, does their thing...the pumpkin gets passed along every year or three, and things continue. And, Perl 5 is developing nicely in a way that it didn&#x27;t for about a decade while there was so much uncertainty. The Pumpking existed before Larry left Perl 5, but acted more in a support role (as I understand it), so it seems like it took a while for it to become an acknowledged executive position when Larry faded from view in Perl 5 development.I think Guido is doing the best thing for Python. If his heart isn&#x27;t in it, stepping back in a clear way is much more helpful that drifting away and leaving a void of leadership with no one feeling empowered to step up. There are people who are recognized as being contenders for the throne, and there&#x27;s already a long-standing community process. I think Python will be fine.

Can tell you performance has never been an issue for me and python. Usually when I see the claim come up it is usually a poor test (ie &quot;let&#x27;s see how fast we can read from a database&quot;) or not knowing the performance options available to python. You can use pypy for JIT compilation performance. You can use eventlet to add co-operative threading &#x2F; evented processing. Use multiprocessing if you want to use more than one core. The point of python is to optimize for human understanding 1st, and if your abstractions are good then you can enable extra performance with other libraries.

Regarding the endless mailinglist thread problem on this PEP, I can only recommend to use a different PEP tool.A wiki leads to more structured argumentation, can be re-ordered and edited and doesn&#x27;t get out of control. Sometimes I also use github issues, because I can update the issues there. But on big issues a wiki page is better.Such a mailinglist discussion is mostly drama without much content.

Now this is a very dangerous situation, looking how perl5 was handled after Larry wall left them and stepped over to perl6.Constant infighting of the core devs, useless communication on the mailing list, not a single worthwhile feature being implemented in 15 years, even if perl6 and Larry designed tons of them suitable for perl5, total destruction of the syntax and the core. The better counterexample was perl6 with stricter processes and some capable devs remaining, but still it&#x27;s another minefield.Good luck, tons of work to do. python 3 could get 10x faster and catch up to php7 or javascript, types could get properly integrated but I don&#x27;t see it coming. Usually you have to expect the worst.

They will form a Anarcho-Syndicalist Commune.
BDFL power can not be derived from some aquatic farce.

Python is certainly one of the more opinionated languages in the OSS world, so there was always going to be contention on syntax and what it means to be Pythonic etc. Kinda amazing Guido put up with it for this long.Thank you, Guido, for putting the B in BDFL when you could.

A list (but Guido is the original): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Benevolent_dictator_for_life" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Benevolent_dictator_for_life</a>

Actually he&#x27;s 62 (I know, I was surprised too!)

God, I can empathize even if only at a much less prominent 
vantage. The skills, will and effort involved are at a level far more than a 50+ can reasonably sustain into the early 70s (if that is the prospect).

Enjoy your well deserved holiday! Send us a postcard ;-)

We started to program with python around 2009, and continued until now and it is my firat choice for almost everything.Thanks Guido for all the fun that we made with python and eased the life of bankers :&#x2F;

Gentle reminder that Python 2 only has 17 months left...

It is Great to see the speed at which wikipedia has updated this occurrence.
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Guido_van_Rossum" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Guido_van_Rossum</a>

Thank you for all your efforts and hard work.It has changed a lot of lives and will continue to do so for a long time.Enjoy the vacation and take care of yourself.

Looks like the Python project is gonna migrate to be democratic, so the decisions can’t be blamed on one guy. That’s interresting how this happens in more and more projects !

I believe a big part of Python&#x27;s success is owed to Guido. However I don&#x27;t think this is a good move. It&#x27;s not very likely, but not impossible that this will even kill Python.Doesn&#x27;t he have any people he trusts in the inner circle of Python development? Would&#x27;ve been much better to have power slowly and uncommented slip into their hands. A process that could have been started years ago.Feels a little like this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;gallery&#x2F;IYYmtqL" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;gallery&#x2F;IYYmtqL</a>

Thank you Guido for creating and shepherding such an amazing language one that has been my go to language for years for its ecosystem and it’s beauty. Seriously thank you so much.

To Guido, a career&#x27;s worth of thanks (I doubt I would have had one without Python) and for being encouraging and supportive to a very young dev at a long ago conference - to keep that up over decades means encouragement, mentoring and optimism was bred in your bones. Have a lovely permanent vacation.To the python community, I hope we can find a successful, democratic way forward.To myself, public service is a good thing - try harder !

Thanks Guido. Python was my primary language from around 2004 - 2017. I&#x27;ve had the chance to present at Pycon a couple of times and get my feet wet in contributing to open source projects with Python. Best of luck.

We run django with django-rest-framework in production to provide our frontend app with the JSON api it needs -- it has some gotchas and isn&#x27;t perfect, but is a treat to work with when you want to split time between front and back work.

I learned Python ~14 years ago. I already had decent C, C++ &amp; C# knowledge, plus a handful of assembly languages. I already knew how to program, but was taken aback by how approachable Python was. I can&#x27;t remember if I started on 2.2 or 2.4, but I basically learned 99% of what I needed to know in the first few days. In the last 14 years, I&#x27;ve written a significant amount of Python, mostly for work (finance&#x2F;trading). It&#x27;s no exaggeration to say that my Python apps had billions, even trillions of dollars worth of orders&#x2F;transactions&#x2F;contracts flowing through them, and Python was rock solid for me every time.It&#x27;s still my scripting language of choice. I&#x27;m still more likely to rewrite a Perl script in Python than I am to try and make any significant change to the Perl script. I like the &quot;batteries included&quot; approach, and that the Python devs prefer to add new features via libraries than new obtuse syntax. I think most of the recent syntax changes were well deserved and wouldn&#x27;t otherwise have been well served by a library (thinks like async, context managers, and going back further generators and the if&#x2F;else ternary expression).Also, I&#x27;m almost exclusively on Python 3 now. The only real issue I&#x27;ve had is constantly needing to remember how to properly open a CSV file for reading (I really don&#x27;t know how they let that wart live for so long).

When I first started getting into programming (was not a CS major in college) everybody said to start learning Python first.I started digging in and a lot of concepts were easy to grasp and I learned quite a bit until I started doing front-end work and I stopped working with it.This year, my buddy who got me into it originally, suggested I look at django and I&#x27;ve been having fun with that in the past few months. Made me think about picking Python back up and working with it again as the front-end scene is just so crazy right now.

If only he&#x27;d done that before that weird unchecked advisory typing thing.

A well deserved vacation! Thank you for the amazing stewardship over decades, Guido.

what you&#x27;re seeing is the straw that broke the camel&#x27;s back

I forget which book this was from, but when I was learning python back in 2003 a major selling point was &#x27;you can&#x27;t make assignments in control structures&#x27;. Happy days to a physics undergrad who had seen more if(a=3) in C code than he could shake a stick at.Sometimes less is more. Python is turning into more is less. It doesn&#x27;t need to be everything to everyone.

Python&#x27;s original &quot;sales pitch&quot; was that it was a clean and simple language. As years go by and more weird stuff is piled in, it becomes less Pythonic.

All this over a god damn bikeshed that no one will care one way or the other about 6 months after its implemented. He didn&#x27;t loose faith after the 2-&gt;3 transitioner but but a goddamn assignment operator that works just like so many other languages.I mean it was bound to happen at some point, but I am really disheartened that it happened in this way.

Thank you Guido for everything you have done.

He&#x27;s finally going to admit that the whole python thing was a terrible, terrible joke, it got completely out of hand, and he can&#x27;t believe people fell for it.

Some people on Internet are reconsidering a second vote for the Brexit, while that PEP didn&#x27;t even have a vote at all, given it was a dictatorship so far.Guido wrote the principles of Python, the principles should outlive his reign. :-)

&gt; If Guido wasn&#x27;t himself while writing the PEP572, I ask for a new vote about the PEP572. I vote against it, the PEP572 should not be implemented.There is really nothing in the e-mail that indicates that.I can only imagine the message it would send to recall the PEP. I guess it would confirm his decision in a most callous way.

That is what I thought too. I read HN since so many years. Perfect example of a rating system turning into a bad censorship.

&gt; Sometime recently, dang and sctb have ruled that downvoting for disagreement is now perfectly acceptable.You are wrong about that: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=117171" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=117171</a>

&gt; Everytime we post an opinion against the consensusDownvoting was, long ago, supposed to be used to indicate trolling, incivility, not substantive, etc. Sometime recently, dang and sctb have ruled that downvoting for disagreement is now perfectly acceptable.In any event, I agree it&#x27;s become a terrible method of hivemind enforcement. Have an upvote.

If Guido wasn&#x27;t himself while writing the PEP572, I ask for a new vote about the PEP572. I vote against it, the PEP572 should not be implemented.To me, it seems a restricted variant on the specific cases &quot;if&quot; and &quot;while&quot; would be good enough, without generalizing to more cases.The exemples of assignment with &quot;all()&quot; and &quot;any()&quot; make me sad. Python had only one way of doing things, now it has two.Reading Python code will be more complicated now than it was 10 years ago for newcomersEdit : I&#x27;m sick of all the downvotes on HN. Everytime we post an opinion against the consensus, it ruins the karma, even if the comment is honest. And of course, I can&#x27;t downvote people, since people keep downvoting me, I never reach the threshold to vote against any comment. The system is unfair to newcomers.

Good for him! I hope he has a long vacation and enjoyment without the responsibility.As he says, the bus is around the corner, and the reaper comes for us all - so governance is a key component of an institution.

I wouldn&#x27;t assume that all the conversation you are seeing is all the conversation.

Sincere question: How is the python ecosystem &#x27;fragmented&#x27;?

What fragmentation do you see beyond v2 vs v3?  I stopped subscribing to the mail list because most of what was coming in was just noise...

&gt; there isn&#x27;t even a single person who stops the clock to evaluate what went wrong that they pushed out the person that started this all.True, although sometimes there isn&#x27;t much to be done. He mentions he is tired of fighting and, with such an enormous project, how do you solve that?This does not bode well for the future of Python, though. The ecosystem is fragmented as it is, I can only imagine how things will look like without the well known leader.

This is because often the &quot;cause&quot; is actually jut time ticking :- What was fun 3 years ago isn&#x27;t anymore- That feature that was useful to your customers is no longer serving purposes- It was about new feature, and now it&#x27;s about maintaining compatibility- ...There is no real cause to &quot;treat&quot;, you just need to adapt to the new environment you are facing.

...there isn&#x27;t even a single person who stops the clock to evaluate what went wrong...This is perfectly consistent with 99% of the management behavior I&#x27;ve witnessed for years in the enterprise. We understand that we live in a world of cause and effect, but almost everyone is so busy poking at the effect that there&#x27;s no energy left to discover and treat the cause.It&#x27;s a shame that so many of us workers continue to have so much passion for the work at hand and so little for everything else. It seems like it almost always comes down to this.Respect, Guido.

I got the impression that this was mostly just a public announcement of something that has been talked about in private for quite some time, and was not in the least unexpected to the core devs. If this is the case then the reaction is suiting imho - after all, these people know each other very well and even if they didn&#x27;t talk about it openly, they probably weren&#x27;t surprised to receive the mail. Besides - it would have happened sooner or later. As he said himself, that bus is still lurking around the corner... [0]I do hope he knows how his contribution changed the world for better for so many people. I have played around with many languages in my career but Python is the most productive and fun of them all. Thank you GvR, and may you have fun whatever you do![0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;legacy.python.org&#x2F;search&#x2F;hypermail&#x2F;python-1994q2&#x2F;1040.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;legacy.python.org&#x2F;search&#x2F;hypermail&#x2F;python-1994q2&#x2F;104...</a>

Some root cause analysis would be nice. Because whatever went wrong that caused GvR to step down isn&#x27;t solved and the future structure whatever form it will take will most likely not be quite as resilient against this as GvR was.Also, an apology for the way this turned out would be seemly.

&gt;because over the long term the market is going to dictate where Python goes and how it growThe market didn&#x27;t give the world any language nearly as readable and approachable for non-programmers.

&gt; but because over the long term the market is going to dictate where Python goes and how it growsThe market gave us the absolute mess that is HTML&#x2F;CSS&#x2F;Javascript today, so I&#x27;m sincerely hoping the Python community will keep agreeing on some greater design principles instead of leaving everything to market forces and pragmatism.

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 &quot;BDFL&quot; 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&#x27;t think it&#x27;s at all unseemly that people involved in the Python project respond to GvR&#x27;s LOA announcement by working out continuity. As someone who has to interact with a lot of Python code professionally, that&#x27;s exactly the response I&#x27;d hope for.

I don&#x27;t read it like that at all.There&#x27;s certainly a friendly nod to the CoC and an invitation for people not willing to adhere to it to leave —and I think that alone would help chill things out— but it&#x27;s a sustained level of often-thankless hard work. Especially if you have a day job where they&#x27;re pushing for more and more performance.This missive is about helping the project move on, not himself. Bollocking the people who have made things hard isn&#x27;t a productive next step. It&#x27;s not what&#x27;s required now; the core devs need to work out how decisions are made.This is that prompt.

I don&#x27;t think a public thread is the right time or place for such a retrospective. Keep in mind Guido&#x27;s parting words (&quot;Finally. A reminder that the archives of this list are public&quot;).And I&#x27;m not sure who would be the right person or people to apologise. A number expressed regret at what happened, but I don&#x27;t really think the core devs are at fault here.

You nail it, I think. Being nice to contributors leads to bullying. Contributors assume, then feel entitled, and it gets harder and harder to say &#x27;no&#x27; -- and it&#x27;s probably very taxing.Linus shoots first, that keeps the bullying down -- of course everyone else thinks he is the bully, however he&#x27;s just protecting himself. I&#x27;ve spent many years victim of bullying, and I know that the only way to beat a bully is to out-bully him.

On the subject of Linus, I wonder if he feels the same way about kernel discussions or if he is less at risk of this kind of burnout?Does being more empathetic when dealing with contributors and their suggestions extract a greater price on one&#x27;s emotional state, compared to the more brash approach Linus has?

The concern was for project continuity. Linus would be fine.

&gt; Not the nicest moment in the history of FOSS, I wonder what kind of a mess will ensue when Linus steps down.It&#x27;s kind of funny to see someone worrying about sparing Linus Torvalds&#x27; feelings.

I&#x27;m not sure anyone &quot;pushed Guido out&quot;, but if anyone did I&#x27;m pretty sure it wasn&#x27;t the people on python-committers.

&gt; I wonder what kind of a mess will ensue when Linus steps down.Maybe an environment that is more respectful and professional?

&gt; Guido van Rossum has given his life for this language and besides the obligatory &#x27;thanks for all the fish&#x27; there isn&#x27;t even a single person who stops the clock to evaluate what went wrong that they pushed out the person that started this all.The lack of introspection that causes one to, in the heat of the moment, behave like a tedious buffoon on a public mailing list is probably associated with the lack of introspection that causes one to not reflect on having behaved like a tedious buffoon on a public mailing list.On the other hand, I had never looked at the Python mailing lists until today and my main impression was that a real dictator on a mailing list without a Code of Conduct could have stopped some of that endless chatter in its tracks if he&#x27;d really wanted to. Absolutely no one springs to mind...

We are acutely aware of why Guido is retiring sooner than any of us expected; it has actually been discussed already on the mailing list as to what went wrong with the PEP 572 discussion and how we could potentially fix it. So there&#x27;s no lack of understanding of why this is occurring now and we have already begun to think about how to address the issue.Many of us have also been thinking about what we would do when this day arrived for years (Guido has hinted at retiring previously), so there&#x27;s a lot of pent-up thought to get out there while we all start to think about what comes next to a project some of us have dedicated decades to. The conversation has been thoughtful and not a single person has said &quot;I should be the next BDFL&quot;. All names put forward by anyone for any position has been by another.IOW the insinuation that any of us who are trying to grapple with this are trying to vie for power while ignoring why this occurred does not seem like a fair assessment to me. This kind of unnecessary negativity and accusation is why Guido is retiring early.

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 &#x27;thanks for all the fish&#x27; there isn&#x27;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&#x27;s &#x27;kthxbye&#x27; and they&#x27;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.

When you take the joy of programming from somebody, you cannot expect them to stick around. At some point, we all have enough.Excited to see what Guido wants to do next, enjoy it!

Thank you for your creativity, support, and stewardship Guido. You left a permanent mark on the programming community!

All these discussions on minor but convenient changes remind me the (famous?) quote: “When art critics get together they talk about content, style, trend and meaning, but that when painters get together they talk about where can you get the best turpentine.”It’s sad to see how critics get in the way of an artist who just needs low-level things to be fckng done in a safe-enough way.

Guido, thanks for all your work on Python. It made a huge impact on my life. I have been writing python for the last 12 years and enjoyed every moment. For many years Python was the best way for me to translate my ideas into a working program, and it made a major effect on the way I think. I wish you great luck on all your future endeavors!

Not the benevolent part(regarding his style of communication)

Especially since Linus is the BDFL most recognized as such.

For anyone else wondering what BDFL means: Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL) is a title given to a small number of open-source software development leaders, typically project founders who retain the final say in disputes or arguments within the community. The phrase originated in 1995 with reference to Guido van Rossum, creator of the Python programming language.[1][2] Shortly after van Rossum joined the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, the term appeared in a follow-up mail by Ken Manheimer to a meeting trying to create a semi-formal group that would oversee Python development and workshops; this initial use included the additional joke of naming van Rossum the &quot;First Interim BDFL&quot;.[1] Source: WikipediaIt&#x27;s interesting that GvR seems to have been the first official BDFL

This is sad to see, but necessary at some point, as others have said. We should all thank him for his contributions, and for the advances in data science experiments enabled by Python&#x27;s ease of use, good design, and advanced features.I am glad that Python is recognized as the quality language it is.Perhaps it&#x27;s synchronicity that in other news this week Elon Musk triple hearted Python, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;elonmusk&#x2F;status&#x2F;1016002749446516737" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;elonmusk&#x2F;status&#x2F;1016002749446516737</a>.

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