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I remember being pretty perturbed a few years ago learning PSF pulled in $5M a year and spent most of the profit on “outreach.” Which is a nice to have at the

I remember being pretty perturbed a few years ago learning PSF pulled in $5M a year and spent most of the profit on “outreach.” Which is a nice to have at the end of a budget but not as the primary item. Meanwhile the packaging group been complaining for a decade+ that they are unpaid volunteers and don’t have the resources to maintain existing features in pip, i. e. why they have broken compatibility several times in the last few years.

simonw 2y ago
The developer in residence program is quite new but is a big improvement in terms of supporting key pieces of the Python ecosystem with paid contributors.
- mixmastamyk 2y ago
  Yes, please continue, and don’t forget packaging. Thankfully astral is stepping up to potentially take that off their hands, de facto if not officially. Oh, and less outreach for one of the most popular programming langs in the world. :-D
  - simonw 2y ago
    The fact that Python is one of the most popular programming languages in the world and the fact that the PSF puts a lot of its effort into community and outreach may well be connected. > The mission of the Python Software Foundation is to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers.
    - mixmastamyk 2y ago
      I don't think so. It has been a learning language for two+ decades, very easy to pick up yet still powerful, and growing. Add the recent decade+ boom in data to machine learning to AI (see other comment). I'd be surprised if outreach activities reached a fraction of that impact. In the other direction, the poor packaging story has definitely hurt it's reputation. Not a single python post goes by without someone complaining about it.
      - mixmastamyk 2y ago
        Also protect is near the front of that statement. While a mission can be anything, it doesn’t make long term sense to look for new roommates when your foundation is crumbling.
    - Kwpolska 2y ago
      Python is popular, because it's simple, and it's great as a glue language. The simplicity made it the language of choice for beginner's computer science courses at universities and schools. The glue language qualities led to numpy/scipy/et al., and that led to Python's popularity when AI/ML/data science became popular. How much of the PSF's 2023 outreach budget was spent on those? How many universities were given money or otherwise convinced to redesign their curriculum using Python? Did it go to numpy?
    - robertlagrant 2y ago
      > The fact that Python is one of the most popular programming languages in the world and the fact that the PSF puts a lot of its effort into community and outreach may well be connected. They may be, as any correlation might imply causation, but it would surprise me. Stack Overflow, great libraries (and their communities), all the data science/scientific computing open source work, the work to date on pypi, the lower barrier-to-entry syntax, as well as actual (C)Python improvements are the main things. As an analogy, I've seen in previous companies that the HR believes they set the culture of the company, and they do things that attempt to improve the culture, but I'd still say that 99%+ of company culture is not coming from HR, except if it were extremely negative (e.g. Microsoft and stack ranking). Thankfully my more recent companies have understood this much more, which is wonderful.
- lrhag 2y ago
  The work they are doing is not important and would have been done for free, had the inner circle not chased away most free contributors and staffed these positions with their friends.
morkalork 2y ago
Hilarious when considering Python is the glue holding together how many billions of AI/ML in industry?
- __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
  They should just turn it off for 24 hours (with plenty of warning so that people who pay attention can be prepared). It might remind that industry that they exist at all.

simonw 2y ago

The developer in residence program is quite new but is a big improvement in terms of supporting key pieces of the Python ecosystem with paid contributors.

mixmastamyk 2y ago
Yes, please continue, and don’t forget packaging. Thankfully astral is stepping up to potentially take that off their hands, de facto if not officially. Oh, and less outreach for one of the most popular programming langs in the world. :-D
- simonw 2y ago
  The fact that Python is one of the most popular programming languages in the world and the fact that the PSF puts a lot of its effort into community and outreach may well be connected. > The mission of the Python Software Foundation is to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers.
  - mixmastamyk 2y ago
    I don't think so. It has been a learning language for two+ decades, very easy to pick up yet still powerful, and growing. Add the recent decade+ boom in data to machine learning to AI (see other comment). I'd be surprised if outreach activities reached a fraction of that impact. In the other direction, the poor packaging story has definitely hurt it's reputation. Not a single python post goes by without someone complaining about it.
    - mixmastamyk 2y ago
      Also protect is near the front of that statement. While a mission can be anything, it doesn’t make long term sense to look for new roommates when your foundation is crumbling.
  - Kwpolska 2y ago
    Python is popular, because it's simple, and it's great as a glue language. The simplicity made it the language of choice for beginner's computer science courses at universities and schools. The glue language qualities led to numpy/scipy/et al., and that led to Python's popularity when AI/ML/data science became popular. How much of the PSF's 2023 outreach budget was spent on those? How many universities were given money or otherwise convinced to redesign their curriculum using Python? Did it go to numpy?
  - robertlagrant 2y ago
    > The fact that Python is one of the most popular programming languages in the world and the fact that the PSF puts a lot of its effort into community and outreach may well be connected. They may be, as any correlation might imply causation, but it would surprise me. Stack Overflow, great libraries (and their communities), all the data science/scientific computing open source work, the work to date on pypi, the lower barrier-to-entry syntax, as well as actual (C)Python improvements are the main things. As an analogy, I've seen in previous companies that the HR believes they set the culture of the company, and they do things that attempt to improve the culture, but I'd still say that 99%+ of company culture is not coming from HR, except if it were extremely negative (e.g. Microsoft and stack ranking). Thankfully my more recent companies have understood this much more, which is wonderful.
lrhag 2y ago
The work they are doing is not important and would have been done for free, had the inner circle not chased away most free contributors and staffed these positions with their friends.

morkalork 2y ago

Hilarious when considering Python is the glue holding together how many billions of AI/ML in industry?

__MatrixMan__ 2y ago
They should just turn it off for 24 hours (with plenty of warning so that people who pay attention can be prepared). It might remind that industry that they exist at all.