It's true and seriously misleading.

He's edited it a lot since (and even toned down its title), but the blog post he wrote against Python 3 was a FUD-filled incoherent piece.

You can absolutely expect members of the Python community to be disappointed. A lot of those members are people who learned from Shaw and to see him write a piece like that is heartbreaking.

The people on /r/Python who called for the removal of links to his resources (because yeah, it's not the PSF actively seeking out websites, it's the websites' members wanting him gone), those people were not "out for vengeance", they were not willing to link to material which actively campaigned against where the community was moving to.

He may be trying to position himself as one, but Zed Shaw was not a voice of reason who would point out the Python 3 flaws which nobody else dared criticize. Plenty of others criticized Python 3. Zed was actually trying to harm the move to it.

Congrats on the book, and I'm glad he changed his mind, but I have no sympathy to his complaints there.

PS: This is what happened to processing durations when I upgraded our Hearthstone log parsing pipeline from Python 2.7 to Python 3.6 after Amazon finally made the latter available on AWS Lambda: https://twitter.com/Adys/status/878985322436206592

This is exactly right, Jerome. I remember Armin being quite vocal against Python 3, but Zed was actively harmful, telling people to stay with 2 even though it was abundantly clear that 2 would not be supported by anyone any more.

Not that the release date has much to do with the benchmark, mind you...

I attended pycon a couple of years ago and was still new to python. I had (tried to) read "Learn Python the Hard Way" as well. I attended many of the "newbie to python" tutorials while at the conference and many of them had this book as a suggested read. I promptly informed the tutorial leaders how the latest version instructed people to never install python 3 and spoke ill of it as if ignored, python3 would just go away (note the tutorial classes where all in python 3). Most people seemed shocked by this but they all removed the recommendation for the book.

Flame me all you, but I was trying to jump ship from Perl (which (un)fortunately didn't really work as years later I still make most of my money from Perl stacks). And the last thing I wanted to jump from was one language that had a giant rift in the community (perl5/perl6) to a "newer" "better" community that had the same rift in it as well. Thankfully people seemed to come to their senses over the last couple of years and have started to throw out their python 2 code.

He played an insignificant parts compared to the large incompetence shown by the team that decided Python's 3 feature set and handled the transition.

In general, whoever decided that such few features (in the initial versions) and such lacklustre fixes should be enough to make people adopt an incompatible version of the language.

They still did it better than the Perl people, so there's that.

It's Python 3.3 where migration started being a serious matter of discussion, and 3.4 added more 2.7 syntax backports to help the transition. And the community did follow on that. 3.3 and 3.4 are where many 2.x libraries added Python 3 compatibility.

Calling the Python core devs incompetent for something where instances of prior art can be counted on the digits of one hand that may have lost a few fingers is a bit rich.

[1] On a subject that I could reasonably be called an expert on. No, I will not elaborate for reasons of pseudonymity. Take that for what it's worth.

[2] As if we even had objective criteria for judging language design at this point in time.

That is, programs from general purpose programming languages can be re-written in any other Turing complete language. Not to be confused with the Zed Shaw "joke" that a programming language is not Turing complete if its interpreter does not run source code written in another Turing complete language, completely unmodified.

With Zed can come... drama. At least that's the way it used to be. I would take what he says with a grain of salt.

To be honest, I am a bit surprised that he adapted the book to Python 3 if he is so strongly against it.

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20161123042252/https://learnpyth...

[1]: https://eev.ee/blog/2016/11/23/a-rebuttal-for-python-3/

A cynic would think that his criticism was an elaborate marketing ploy to drive up sales of the eventual Python 3 edition of the book which he had planned all along...

Something worth knowing about the PSF is that there are multiple groups to which this term might (correctly or incorrectly) be applied by someone who wasn't familiar with its workings.

Most importantly, literally anyone on earth can become a "member" (in the technical bylaws-of-the-foundation sense) for free by filling out an online form.

The question here is whether someone who is legally authorized to represent and act on behalf of the PSF did something in their capacity as a representative/official of the PSF. Which really is something only the Board of Directors, or someone they designate, can do. The records of the Board's meetings and actions are public:

https://www.python.org/psf/records/board/

So if you want to verify this claim it ought to be easy to find in there.

(disclaimer: I am a Fellow of the PSF, which is a sort of permanent voting member, but not board membership. I am on the Board of Directors of the Django Software Foundation, though, so I have some experience with how actions can be misinterpreted or misrepresented...)

I hope you carry on with Python!