8 ms·

Guido blames social media for his decision to abandon the supervision of Python

91 points by revyuh 7y ago

MrGilbert 7y ago
For a "Benevolent Dictator", social media should be like the schoolyard for a teacher: Let the folks have their talks, their chit-chat. If there is a real issue, it's up to them to voice it. If they question your authority, so be it. Maybe this is something you have to get used to.
- heyoni 7y ago
  It’s also strange to think people who are specialized enough to keep abreast of pythons development would be online trolling people enough to get his attention.
- java_script 7y ago
  It's 2019 and we're all posters now. Even the leader of the free world is involved with the kind of online disputes that internet addicts were having in the 2000s on vBulletin sites. Congress has had hearing from people mad that their posts weren't getting enough traction. It's hilarious but I'm no longer surprised when I find out someone famous is as 'online' as me now.
jsmeaton 7y ago
The governance model has already been decided, and the steering council elected. https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwj9wfzQhIfiAhUbcCsKHR_eBwEQzPwBegQIARAC&url=https%3A%2F%2Fsnarky.ca%2Fan-update-on-pythons-governance%2F&psig=AOvVaw20lBJ5sZiwPycetdS3TOdm&ust=1557236626663837 https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwj9...
- cpach 7y ago
  Permalink: https://snarky.ca/an-update-on-pythons-governance/ https://snarky.ca/an-update-on-pythons-governance/
- brittohalloran 7y ago
  PEP-8016 [1] has the details of the steering council mechanism (5 person elected council, describes their powers), and PEP-8100 [2] has the results of the election and now shows vote totals. [1] https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-8016/ https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-8016/ [2] https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-8100/#results https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-8100/#results
caymanjim 7y ago
Every leader throughout history has had to put up with the discontent of the governed. Being thick-skinned and ignoring the barbs is part of the job. Social media is a red herring here; this sort of thing has happened on all forms of social media since the dawn of computing. It used to be on mailing lists and Usenet. Now it's primarily on Twitter. After 30 years of leading a project, anyone is going to get worn down.
- anc84 7y ago
  The psychological feedback loops and self-affirmation have been tweaked to perversion and addiction by social media. There are notifications, +1, heart, subreferences, everything, everywhere. It has become much more overwhelming.
  - user17843 7y ago
    yes, it's sickening. I do my best to filter out all the like and upvote stuff, but it doesn't really help because it changes the entire atmosphere of a platform and thus affects me too.
dotdi 7y ago
> “Dripping water hollows out stone, not through force but through persistence.” ― Ovid It's not easy to take all the hate and ill-will day in day out. It's not even easy to ignore it, much less to deal with it. I respect Guido's decision even though I was quite sad to see him step down. It's not difficult to see that, with Pythons growing popularity, things would probably have become even worse for him in the future.
- nabla9 7y ago
  Social media gives unfair advantage to a horde of ankle biters, influences and opinionated individuals to affect things that matter. Even completely harmful promotion can snowball into supporting harmful behaviour. CTO or senior developer in a small company may feel the need to promote stuff they do by writing technical articles and commenting ongoing debates in the social media. Attaching comments to anything that is trending is important if you want to promote stuff. Suddenly the person is committed with his own name to something he did not thing trough and unintentionally adding side support to some hate campaign.
  - DFHippie 7y ago
    Not to bite any angles, but s/angle biter/ankle biter/.
rodorgas 7y ago
A dictator that can’t stand to others questioning your decisions is a weak dictator. Python is mature enough to have the current governance model, but his exit could have been less noisy.
- Insanity 7y ago
  a "dictator" is still human. I think you might underestimate how annoying people can be online.
twerkmonsta 7y ago
No offense to Guido, and I love Python, but the transition from Python 2 to Python 3 is a reference point for me in terms of how NOT to update a programming language. Noone should ever be attacked, but surely someone deserves some criticism.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- program_whiz 7y ago
  What was your issue with the transition? Basically both are still usable, and python3 is a huge improvement over python2. I used python2.7 for years before switching and realizing python3 is strictly better, but it was nearly seamless transition (sure legacy projects might have a little pain, but how else can you make fundamental language changes?)
  - jbay808 7y ago
    I like the print function style of print, but unfortunately many of the "My First Hello World in Python" tutorials available online broke when the old print was removed. Those tutorials usually don't make a point of saying they're only valid in Python 2, and of course all new users just learning a language for a first time will download the latest version to try. For a new programmer, it can be a very discouraging experience having to debug even your first hello world program even though it perfectly matches the code in the tutorial.
- beambot 7y ago
  What would you have done differently? Frankly, it seemed pretty principled to me -- enough to where I wouldn't be comfortable Monday quarterbacking.
  - devit 7y ago
    Make the 2 vs 3 language decision be module-specific with a single Python executable supporting both languages, allowing you to freely mix Python 2 and 3 files and libraries and thus not splitting the ecosystem.
mjw1007 7y ago
Note that Guido has been elected to the new steering council, and the council has been delegating language-design questions to him. So I think (and hope) the effect of these changes will be that Guido will make more or less the same decisions as before, but both be under less stress when doing so (because he doesn't have to be the final decision maker), and no longer have to be concerned about people questioning the source of his authority.
gubbrora 7y ago
Sad to hear. I don't know what exactly he did for python project, but if we take the pudding as proof of the recipe he did a lot of things right Edit: I meant I don't know what he did as a bdfl day to day.
- misthop 7y ago
  He literally invented the language, and until stepping down last year (as described in this link) he was the python BDFL (Benevolent Dictator for Life) I apologize if this came off snarky - I did not mean for it to, I just wanted to emphasize Guido's contributions. (edited)
cletus 7y ago
Serious question: did anything good come out of paying attention to Twitter? Like, ever? I'm sure it has its bubble-living adherents here. Then again, so did Quora. As for the claim of "questioning [his] authority", isn't that a given? With or without social media. That's pretty much human nature. It's up to you to establish the tone and medium of how people interact with you. Linus, for example, is pretty much strictly email and most things go through one of the "inner circle" who are largely responsible for areas like networking. As brash as he can be, you pretty much know what to expect and you have delegation. Honestly, I wonder how much of this goes back to GvR's handling of Python 3. This should go down as something to be studied for years on how not to do a breaking change. IIRC Python 3 was released in 2008. Here we are in 2019 with no end in sight for Python 2.7. My favourite Python 3ism was the removal of the s and u string literal prefixes. In Python 2.0+, u'this is a string' was a Unicode literal prefix. It was removed in 3.0 for reasons that are beyond me (I know Unicode became the default for string literals) but then added back in 3.3 for backwards compatibility. Why remove it in the first place? It makes no sense. But this just went to the perception that the Python powers-that-be were removed from reality in their hubris. Anyway, GvR... one can't help but respect his stewardship and contribution to Python. Please make no mistake about that. The weird thing about human nature is in situations like this, if the peanut gallery senses they're getting to you it only encourages them. Sad but true.
- thanatos_dem 7y ago
  > Here we are in 2019 with no end in sight for Python 2.7 An end is in sight, is coming soon, and it’s sort of concerning that more folks haven’t realized it yet - https://pythonclock.org/ https://pythonclock.org/
  - StavrosK 7y ago
    Seriously, I wonder how many of the people who proclaim "no end in sight" for 2.7 are actually using Python. In the usage I can see, the majority of the ecosystem seems to support 3, and at least a large minority has stopped supporting 2.
    - 7y ago
misthop 7y ago
Many people here are referencing the 2 to 3 process as germane to the discussion, but it was really PEP 572 (the walrus operator := ) that was it for him. PEP 572 was _hugely_ contentious among the core devs, much more so than the 2 to 3 transition. Citation - Yesterday at Pycon during the Steering Council meeting he stated that he tendered his BDFL resignation the morning after approving that PEP
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Demiurge 7y ago
This is not an accurate title. He is not blaming ths social media, he is blaming the developers who engaged in social politics instead of open and honest conversation.
ravenstine 7y ago
Not that I think Guido's decision to leave his supervisory role is wrong, but couldn't he have simply not engaged with social media and just continue his role without all the negative garbage input? It's not like the things people say on Twitter without accountability is worth a damn.
amelius 7y ago
What I don't get is if you're tired of certain forms of social media, then why don't you quit using those?
mixmastamyk 7y ago
Believe the Python3 change is a bit of a red-herring, everyone learned from that. The breaking point was PEP 572 (ie :=) which was quite controversial. The lesson here: One shouldn't attempt to reverse 25-year old design decisions, not even GvR. Python is too big now. There was a compromise (and more congruent) alternative, reuse of the "as" keyword, that was thrown out immediately, and proponents rammed 572 thru despite significant objection. That's when things got ugly. Personally I disagreed with that decision, and tried to support the compromise design. In the end, didn't think 572 was the end of the world (will be occasionally useful, if ugly), and tried to stay polite, but sadly many didn't. Then he accepted 572 and stepped down, as if one last poke in the eye, unfortunately.
- metalliqaz 7y ago
  I think you're right about 572, although even that wouldn't have been enough without all the other stuff from the past, such as the unicode strings. I often have to write things like this: m = re.match() if m: do something So I'm looking forward to the feature. I'm not sure you were fair to the process about the alternative syntax, though. They did give a well-reasoned explanation for discounting it.
  - mixmastamyk 7y ago
    It was discounted because it was less flexible, didn't handle as many use cases. True. However, during the process Victor Stinner rewrote one large module using the new syntax as an exercise. We learned that ~95% of the time, only the simplest case was used, the form you gave above. The extra flexibility turned out not very important in real code. We had a choice of ":=" syntax, duplicate but full functionality, and losing the BDFL, or ~95% functionality, language congruity, and keeping him. They chose the former. Maybe Guido stepping aside will be good in the long run however, it was bound to happen eventually.
linsomniac 7y ago
It is really hard on maintainers. I think a lot of it is that old adage "It takes 10 positive things to counteract one negative one." And, for some reason, people on the Internet can choose to have any alternate persona they want, and what do they choose? The shittiest person imaginable. There was a really good Keynote by Brett Cannon last year at PyCon about how hard, emotionally, maintaining OSS is: https://youtu.be/tzFWz5fiVKU?t=3259 https://youtu.be/tzFWz5fiVKU?t=3259 -- Unfortunately the official post is buried after 50 minutes of lightning talks. He gets very emotional on stage. I was sitting with him before he gave this talk, it was a very hard talk for him to give, and so very important. My own story like this: I took over maintenance of a module that had been abandoned, but after the better part of a decade I ran into a time in my life where I have little time for it. It had been languishing, but someone finally offered to help out on the maintenance. Great! I added them to the github project, they started triaging issues, and within a day this guy started spitting vitriol at the new maintainer. I called this guy out, but he doubled down. I just locked the issue and moved on with my life. But this guy tracked me down and sent me an e-mail to my personal e-mail full of expletives. Followed quickly by an apology: "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to send that e-mail from my work e-mail address, please don't get me fired." Literally: No apology for being a jerk, just begging me not to share that exchange with their employer. All of the github comments he had made were removed or severely edited. And... That person who offered to maintain that module? That was the last time they touched it.
- mixmastamyk 7y ago
  Clowns must be held accountable for their actions, otherwise they don't learn.
draw_down 7y ago
Sounds like going forward, anyone who wants to seriously lead a project will need to devise a way to deal with this. It's fine to lament the "hate" and "trolls" that are present online. (And it's also a very easy shot to take, by the way- no one will seriously disagree with it.) But assuming those are going to be around for at least a while longer, if not forever, to withstand it long-term you need to outright ignore it, or decide the things people say don't matter, or something. It is true that each of us is responsible for what we say, online and elsewhere. And it is true that many people do not honor that responsibility, particularly online. It is also true that each of us is responsible for how we respond to what people say about us, online and elsewhere.
uglycoyote 7y ago
Although the article was mostly about this social media issue, watching the attached video I found Guido's statements about diversity and unconscious bias in Open Source to be a much more interesting part of the interview. (around the 23 minute mark) Quote from Guido: If you say "our project is open, anybody can come and join us, anybody can contribute", you are really underestimating the issues. Because it is not just joining the project that's the problem, it is staying in the project. Which means you have to feel comfortable exchanging emails and code reviews and what-all with people that you don't know personally but you communicate frequently online. And that sort of communication requires that everybody has respect for each other, and that respect is often missing because of unconscious biases, where guys and sometimes even women, who believe that they have no bias, don't realize that there are small differences in communication styles between men and women, (sometimes they are large differences) that just make it harder for women to join a particular community. Because it's not just about writing the code, you have to sort of stand up for your code, defend your code, and there is a certain male attitude there that is endemic in many projects, where a woman for example would just not feel comfortable sort of claiming that she is right, that she has the correct insight to decide or to choose a solution, while a guy who knows less than that woman might honestly believe more in their own being right, and so they present a much more confident image. And so they have a much easier time even when they are not all that competent. As long as they present confidence they might get their inferior solution adopted. A woman will more likely feel that she has to have a perfect solution and a perfect understanding of the issues, why it is a perfect solution, before she will even submit a patch. I am doing a fair amount of mentoring of women specifically, and I found that sometimes women I am mentoring will ask for my approval on every step of the way. They will say "I want to file an issue on the bug tracker but I'm afraid of the negative backlash when I put the issue in, can I tell you what I want to write the issue about?" That is charming, but and I always tell them "just put it in the tracker already! your head is not going to be bitten off, you will got honest feedback, and whether the feedback is 'that is a good idea' or 'that is a bad idea' it will be fine". But I'm sure a guy of the same skill level would not hesitate to just put the issue in the tracker. It is a bit of an attitude and mentality difference which makes it much harder for competent women to get started and stay afloat in this community where the male attitude is the default attitude. Because if someone presents that uncertainty, they are much more likely to get ignored or rejected.

91 points by revyuh 7y ago

For a "Benevolent Dictator", social media should be like the schoolyard for a teacher: Let the folks have their talks, their chit-chat. If there is a real issue, it's up to them to voice it. If they question your authority, so be it. Maybe this is something you have to get used to.

heyoni 7y ago
It’s also strange to think people who are specialized enough to keep abreast of pythons development would be online trolling people enough to get his attention.
java_script 7y ago
It's 2019 and we're all posters now. Even the leader of the free world is involved with the kind of online disputes that internet addicts were having in the 2000s on vBulletin sites. Congress has had hearing from people mad that their posts weren't getting enough traction. It's hilarious but I'm no longer surprised when I find out someone famous is as 'online' as me now.

jsmeaton 7y ago

The governance model has already been decided, and the steering council elected. https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwj9wfzQhIfiAhUbcCsKHR_eBwEQzPwBegQIARAC&url=https%3A%2F%2Fsnarky.ca%2Fan-update-on-pythons-governance%2F&psig=AOvVaw20lBJ5sZiwPycetdS3TOdm&ust=1557236626663837 https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwj9...

cpach 7y ago
Permalink: https://snarky.ca/an-update-on-pythons-governance/ https://snarky.ca/an-update-on-pythons-governance/
brittohalloran 7y ago
PEP-8016 [1] has the details of the steering council mechanism (5 person elected council, describes their powers), and PEP-8100 [2] has the results of the election and now shows vote totals. [1] https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-8016/ https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-8016/ [2] https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-8100/#results https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-8100/#results

caymanjim 7y ago

Every leader throughout history has had to put up with the discontent of the governed. Being thick-skinned and ignoring the barbs is part of the job. Social media is a red herring here; this sort of thing has happened on all forms of social media since the dawn of computing. It used to be on mailing lists and Usenet. Now it's primarily on Twitter. After 30 years of leading a project, anyone is going to get worn down.

anc84 7y ago
The psychological feedback loops and self-affirmation have been tweaked to perversion and addiction by social media. There are notifications, +1, heart, subreferences, everything, everywhere. It has become much more overwhelming.
- user17843 7y ago
  yes, it's sickening. I do my best to filter out all the like and upvote stuff, but it doesn't really help because it changes the entire atmosphere of a platform and thus affects me too.

dotdi 7y ago

> “Dripping water hollows out stone, not through force but through persistence.” ― Ovid It's not easy to take all the hate and ill-will day in day out. It's not even easy to ignore it, much less to deal with it. I respect Guido's decision even though I was quite sad to see him step down. It's not difficult to see that, with Pythons growing popularity, things would probably have become even worse for him in the future.

nabla9 7y ago
Social media gives unfair advantage to a horde of ankle biters, influences and opinionated individuals to affect things that matter. Even completely harmful promotion can snowball into supporting harmful behaviour. CTO or senior developer in a small company may feel the need to promote stuff they do by writing technical articles and commenting ongoing debates in the social media. Attaching comments to anything that is trending is important if you want to promote stuff. Suddenly the person is committed with his own name to something he did not thing trough and unintentionally adding side support to some hate campaign.
- DFHippie 7y ago
  Not to bite any angles, but s/angle biter/ankle biter/.

rodorgas 7y ago

A dictator that can’t stand to others questioning your decisions is a weak dictator. Python is mature enough to have the current governance model, but his exit could have been less noisy.

Insanity 7y ago
a "dictator" is still human. I think you might underestimate how annoying people can be online.

twerkmonsta 7y ago

No offense to Guido, and I love Python, but the transition from Python 2 to Python 3 is a reference point for me in terms of how NOT to update a programming language. Noone should ever be attacked, but surely someone deserves some criticism.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
program_whiz 7y ago
What was your issue with the transition? Basically both are still usable, and python3 is a huge improvement over python2. I used python2.7 for years before switching and realizing python3 is strictly better, but it was nearly seamless transition (sure legacy projects might have a little pain, but how else can you make fundamental language changes?)
- jbay808 7y ago
  I like the print function style of print, but unfortunately many of the "My First Hello World in Python" tutorials available online broke when the old print was removed. Those tutorials usually don't make a point of saying they're only valid in Python 2, and of course all new users just learning a language for a first time will download the latest version to try. For a new programmer, it can be a very discouraging experience having to debug even your first hello world program even though it perfectly matches the code in the tutorial.
beambot 7y ago
What would you have done differently? Frankly, it seemed pretty principled to me -- enough to where I wouldn't be comfortable Monday quarterbacking.
- devit 7y ago
  Make the 2 vs 3 language decision be module-specific with a single Python executable supporting both languages, allowing you to freely mix Python 2 and 3 files and libraries and thus not splitting the ecosystem.

mjw1007 7y ago

Note that Guido has been elected to the new steering council, and the council has been delegating language-design questions to him. So I think (and hope) the effect of these changes will be that Guido will make more or less the same decisions as before, but both be under less stress when doing so (because he doesn't have to be the final decision maker), and no longer have to be concerned about people questioning the source of his authority.

gubbrora 7y ago

Sad to hear. I don't know what exactly he did for python project, but if we take the pudding as proof of the recipe he did a lot of things right Edit: I meant I don't know what he did as a bdfl day to day.

misthop 7y ago
He literally invented the language, and until stepping down last year (as described in this link) he was the python BDFL (Benevolent Dictator for Life) I apologize if this came off snarky - I did not mean for it to, I just wanted to emphasize Guido's contributions. (edited)

cletus 7y ago

Serious question: did anything good come out of paying attention to Twitter? Like, ever? I'm sure it has its bubble-living adherents here. Then again, so did Quora. As for the claim of "questioning [his] authority", isn't that a given? With or without social media. That's pretty much human nature. It's up to you to establish the tone and medium of how people interact with you. Linus, for example, is pretty much strictly email and most things go through one of the "inner circle" who are largely responsible for areas like networking. As brash as he can be, you pretty much know what to expect and you have delegation. Honestly, I wonder how much of this goes back to GvR's handling of Python 3. This should go down as something to be studied for years on how not to do a breaking change. IIRC Python 3 was released in 2008. Here we are in 2019 with no end in sight for Python 2.7. My favourite Python 3ism was the removal of the s and u string literal prefixes. In Python 2.0+, u'this is a string' was a Unicode literal prefix. It was removed in 3.0 for reasons that are beyond me (I know Unicode became the default for string literals) but then added back in 3.3 for backwards compatibility. Why remove it in the first place? It makes no sense. But this just went to the perception that the Python powers-that-be were removed from reality in their hubris. Anyway, GvR... one can't help but respect his stewardship and contribution to Python. Please make no mistake about that. The weird thing about human nature is in situations like this, if the peanut gallery senses they're getting to you it only encourages them. Sad but true.

thanatos_dem 7y ago
> Here we are in 2019 with no end in sight for Python 2.7 An end is in sight, is coming soon, and it’s sort of concerning that more folks haven’t realized it yet - https://pythonclock.org/ https://pythonclock.org/
- StavrosK 7y ago
  Seriously, I wonder how many of the people who proclaim "no end in sight" for 2.7 are actually using Python. In the usage I can see, the majority of the ecosystem seems to support 3, and at least a large minority has stopped supporting 2.
  - 7y ago

misthop 7y ago

Many people here are referencing the 2 to 3 process as germane to the discussion, but it was really PEP 572 (the walrus operator := ) that was it for him. PEP 572 was _hugely_ contentious among the core devs, much more so than the 2 to 3 transition. Citation - Yesterday at Pycon during the Steering Council meeting he stated that he tendered his BDFL resignation the morning after approving that PEP

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Demiurge 7y ago

This is not an accurate title. He is not blaming ths social media, he is blaming the developers who engaged in social politics instead of open and honest conversation.

ravenstine 7y ago

Not that I think Guido's decision to leave his supervisory role is wrong, but couldn't he have simply not engaged with social media and just continue his role without all the negative garbage input? It's not like the things people say on Twitter without accountability is worth a damn.

amelius 7y ago

What I don't get is if you're tired of certain forms of social media, then why don't you quit using those?

mixmastamyk 7y ago

Believe the Python3 change is a bit of a red-herring, everyone learned from that. The breaking point was PEP 572 (ie :=) which was quite controversial. The lesson here: One shouldn't attempt to reverse 25-year old design decisions, not even GvR. Python is too big now. There was a compromise (and more congruent) alternative, reuse of the "as" keyword, that was thrown out immediately, and proponents rammed 572 thru despite significant objection. That's when things got ugly. Personally I disagreed with that decision, and tried to support the compromise design. In the end, didn't think 572 was the end of the world (will be occasionally useful, if ugly), and tried to stay polite, but sadly many didn't. Then he accepted 572 and stepped down, as if one last poke in the eye, unfortunately.

metalliqaz 7y ago
I think you're right about 572, although even that wouldn't have been enough without all the other stuff from the past, such as the unicode strings. I often have to write things like this: m = re.match() if m: do something So I'm looking forward to the feature. I'm not sure you were fair to the process about the alternative syntax, though. They did give a well-reasoned explanation for discounting it.
- mixmastamyk 7y ago
  It was discounted because it was less flexible, didn't handle as many use cases. True. However, during the process Victor Stinner rewrote one large module using the new syntax as an exercise. We learned that ~95% of the time, only the simplest case was used, the form you gave above. The extra flexibility turned out not very important in real code. We had a choice of ":=" syntax, duplicate but full functionality, and losing the BDFL, or ~95% functionality, language congruity, and keeping him. They chose the former. Maybe Guido stepping aside will be good in the long run however, it was bound to happen eventually.

linsomniac 7y ago

It is really hard on maintainers. I think a lot of it is that old adage "It takes 10 positive things to counteract one negative one." And, for some reason, people on the Internet can choose to have any alternate persona they want, and what do they choose? The shittiest person imaginable. There was a really good Keynote by Brett Cannon last year at PyCon about how hard, emotionally, maintaining OSS is: https://youtu.be/tzFWz5fiVKU?t=3259 https://youtu.be/tzFWz5fiVKU?t=3259 -- Unfortunately the official post is buried after 50 minutes of lightning talks. He gets very emotional on stage. I was sitting with him before he gave this talk, it was a very hard talk for him to give, and so very important. My own story like this: I took over maintenance of a module that had been abandoned, but after the better part of a decade I ran into a time in my life where I have little time for it. It had been languishing, but someone finally offered to help out on the maintenance. Great! I added them to the github project, they started triaging issues, and within a day this guy started spitting vitriol at the new maintainer. I called this guy out, but he doubled down. I just locked the issue and moved on with my life. But this guy tracked me down and sent me an e-mail to my personal e-mail full of expletives. Followed quickly by an apology: "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to send that e-mail from my work e-mail address, please don't get me fired." Literally: No apology for being a jerk, just begging me not to share that exchange with their employer. All of the github comments he had made were removed or severely edited. And... That person who offered to maintain that module? That was the last time they touched it.

mixmastamyk 7y ago
Clowns must be held accountable for their actions, otherwise they don't learn.

draw_down 7y ago

Sounds like going forward, anyone who wants to seriously lead a project will need to devise a way to deal with this. It's fine to lament the "hate" and "trolls" that are present online. (And it's also a very easy shot to take, by the way- no one will seriously disagree with it.) But assuming those are going to be around for at least a while longer, if not forever, to withstand it long-term you need to outright ignore it, or decide the things people say don't matter, or something. It is true that each of us is responsible for what we say, online and elsewhere. And it is true that many people do not honor that responsibility, particularly online. It is also true that each of us is responsible for how we respond to what people say about us, online and elsewhere.

uglycoyote 7y ago

Although the article was mostly about this social media issue, watching the attached video I found Guido's statements about diversity and unconscious bias in Open Source to be a much more interesting part of the interview. (around the 23 minute mark) Quote from Guido: If you say "our project is open, anybody can come and join us, anybody can contribute", you are really underestimating the issues. Because it is not just joining the project that's the problem, it is staying in the project. Which means you have to feel comfortable exchanging emails and code reviews and what-all with people that you don't know personally but you communicate frequently online. And that sort of communication requires that everybody has respect for each other, and that respect is often missing because of unconscious biases, where guys and sometimes even women, who believe that they have no bias, don't realize that there are small differences in communication styles between men and women, (sometimes they are large differences) that just make it harder for women to join a particular community. Because it's not just about writing the code, you have to sort of stand up for your code, defend your code, and there is a certain male attitude there that is endemic in many projects, where a woman for example would just not feel comfortable sort of claiming that she is right, that she has the correct insight to decide or to choose a solution, while a guy who knows less than that woman might honestly believe more in their own being right, and so they present a much more confident image. And so they have a much easier time even when they are not all that competent. As long as they present confidence they might get their inferior solution adopted. A woman will more likely feel that she has to have a perfect solution and a perfect understanding of the issues, why it is a perfect solution, before she will even submit a patch. I am doing a fair amount of mentoring of women specifically, and I found that sometimes women I am mentoring will ask for my approval on every step of the way. They will say "I want to file an issue on the bug tracker but I'm afraid of the negative backlash when I put the issue in, can I tell you what I want to write the issue about?" That is charming, but and I always tell them "just put it in the tracker already! your head is not going to be bitten off, you will got honest feedback, and whether the feedback is 'that is a good idea' or 'that is a bad idea' it will be fine". But I'm sure a guy of the same skill level would not hesitate to just put the issue in the tracker. It is a bit of an attitude and mentality difference which makes it much harder for competent women to get started and stay afloat in this community where the male attitude is the default attitude. Because if someone presents that uncertainty, they are much more likely to get ignored or rejected.