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He is not. He has been working on it for 25 years and he is just fed up to having to explain again and again the same things. He doesn't want to see the careful
by sametmax 7y ago
He is not. He has been working on it for 25 years and he is just fed up to having to explain again and again the same things. He doesn't want to see the careful and long work he did being dragged to a standard he considers lower.
There is always a new person coming with a new idea. It's exhausting, because it's required to make the language evolve, but it's also a new opportunity to screw things up evertime.
And if he had let most people got their way during the last 2 decades, python would have ended just meh.
Of course, everytime a new debate starts, everybody thinks that this time, just this time, he is wrong and they are right. I did too. We are all part of it.
I get the reaction. There is a limit to what a person can take, and it's why he stepped down as a bdfl.
But seing your baby and your reputation at stake is hard.
- mruts 7y agoI dunno, Python is the epitome of a "meh" language. Guido has help Python back with his antiquated "get off my lawn" attitude since he created it. The language itself is inferior in expressiveness and performance to almost any other modern language. The only reason anyone uses it anymore is the network effects of the library are very strong, especially is fields relating to ML and data science.
- sametmax 7y agoThose libs did not come out of nowhere, and the language did not rise from 1991 to the today without inherent qualities that draw people to it. Python didn't have any specialty like PHP, or an accidental monopoly like JS. It didn't come with a killer app like Ruby. It hasn't been made by a giant company like Go. It's pretty much a self-made language.
- mruts 7y agoThere’s other languages that fit the same criteria that are much better: Scala, OCaml, Racket, or Haskell. The inherent qualities that draw people to Python are that it’s so inexpressive and crippled that you can learn it in 30 minutes.
- sametmax 7y agoWhat you call crippled, some call it sculpted. What you call inexpressive, some call it readable. You have a lot of contempt to offer, I'll let you with it and get work done.
- newen 7y agoAgreed. Most people who like Python seem to never have had experience with functional languages.
- sametmax 7y agoOf course we do. We just happen to value things you don't. When you don't work with 10x programmers and experience the corporate world, you suddently see purity in a very different light.
- mixmastamyk 7y agoMost people don’t have much experience. Any more middlebrow dismissal to offer?
- anderspitman 7y agoI'm not sure if I'd agree. Python was pretty lucky to have numpy/pandas when "data science" started taking off a few years ago. It easily could have been another language.
- sametmax 7y agoNumpy arrived in python because the language allowed mathematicians who were not programmers to get their job done and then do stuff that were not math related as well. They don't have the desire to learn what a monad is, they don't want to type variables when exploring a badly formated heterogenous data dump, and they do want to be able to read the code of their intern freshly out of school once he leave without writing down any doc.
- mixmastamyk 7y agoPretty lucky to be an overnight success, 25 years in the making.