> but because over the long term the market is going to dictate where Python goes and how it grows

The market gave us the absolute mess that is HTML/CSS/Javascript today, so I'm sincerely hoping the Python community will keep agreeing on some greater design principles instead of leaving everything to market forces and pragmatism.

"The market" took over after a long period of "design by committee" that had "strong design principles"[1] resulting in something that was both inadequate for what people wanted to do and didn't evolve at a promising pace (likely because of said principles).

When the market did take over, the problem was that those poor foundations weren't thrown out completely. You can only do so much by strapping turbines on a camel (no offense to camels). At least we can actually write (mediocre) applications with HTML/CSS/JS now.

The other part of the mess is caused by the ever-growing amount of trend-hopping junior developers that want to try out new things - and their superiors letting them do it. If the foundation wasn't so bad, there would be less incentive to try and re-invent anything. Other platforms are fully market-driven, they didn't produce such a mess, because the market rewards stability (hence the low initial adoption rates of Python 3).

[1] https://www.w3.org/People/Bos/CSS-variables

> "The market" took over after a long period of "design by committee" that had "strong design principles"[1]

Yes, but a committee (or a community if that term has too many bad connotations) can at least argue about the design principles and on occasion decide to change them using a well-defined process (e.g. rough consensus or voting).

> When the market did take over, the problem was that those poor foundations weren't thrown out completely.

The original plan of the W3C TAG was to pull the foundations and make a fresh start with XHTML2. The browser vendors objected to that and chose to instead evolve the original HTML into what we have today.

> The other part of the mess is caused by the ever-growing amount of trend-hopping junior developers that want to try out new things...

But that's the point. Those trend-hopping junior developers and their bosses are the market: If you view programming languages as products, those are the early-adopters, one of the generally most sought-after part of the customer base. If you want to be 100% market-driven, you have to listen to them.

> ...because the market rewards stability

The market apparently didn't bother much that HTML is now a "living standard", browser release cycles are measured in weeks and generally a software is considered dead if it doesn't receive any more updates.

> Yes, but a committee (or a community if that term has too many bad connotations) can at least argue about the design principles and on occasion decide to change them using a well-defined process (e.g. rough consensus or voting).

The underlying assumption here must be that this somehow leads to better results overall, but where's the evidence for that? "Design by committee" has a negative connotation for a reason.

> The original plan of the W3C TAG was to pull the foundations and make a fresh start with XHTML2. The browser vendors objected to that and chose to instead evolve the original HTML into what we have today.

That's because "the market" doesn't want things to break. Like I said, it should've been thrown out, but for obvious reasons it wasn't. The point is, you can't blame "the market" for having created the mess in the first place.

> But that's the point. Those trend-hopping junior developers and their bosses are the market...

They are a force within that market and it just so happens that so many new people come into the industry because "web stuff" is needed now, but it won't be growing like that forever. These young programmers will grow old and tired (and so will their bosses) and at that point conservatism will settle in, like it has in many other areas as well. It's a market fluctuation.

> The market apparently didn't bother much that HTML is now a "living standard", browser release cycles are measured in weeks and generally a software is considered dead if it doesn't receive any more updates.

The pace at which new browser features are adopted is actually rather slow, but more importantly, old stuff usually doesn't break. For example, jQuery might be outdated from a developer perspective, but it still powers a lot of stuff.

So the reality is that the growth of the web far outpaced any sort of design principles that could have been implemented by any committee.

TCP/IP development happened quietly for the most part in the 1960s-70s. There wasn't a lot of pressure, and they had a decent amount of time to get the protocols right. There wasn't an economic demand for Arpanet.

And it wasn't until about 1993/1994 that the web exploded in use and popularity. That was only 4 years after TBL created HTML. That's when you saw the explosion of JS/Java Applets/CSS/Browser Plugins/etc.

In some sense, the same thing is happening in the python world. While python has been around for a while, there were maybe 800 python devs at Pycon 2010. In Pycon 2018 there were 3000ish(?).

I do agree with you that the Python 3 update wasn't done well, I think it is because they didn't predict the language's explosion during the 2010's.

I think Javascript has been rapidly getting better, as a language. Every time you hear a front end dev complain about having to support IE, consider that an endorsement of the way HTML/CSS/Javascript has been improving. No one is complaining about having to use the latest version of Javascript to support the new Chrome.

Dunno about that. According to Kyle Simpson (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pL28CcEijU) ES6 has introduced plenty of WTFs to add to the archives. Back-to-front, inconsistent destructuring and Symbols which hide from object enumeration. And after all these new versions Javascript still lacks really basic functions such as range().

Hopefully it transitions into a similar way that C++ is managed.

Oh I hope not; I much prefer the much more regular release schedule of Python (though since I went from C++ to Python a few years ago, I understand C++'s development speed has picked up somewhat).

New versions of C++ are released every 3 years, very systematically. It's much more regular than Python. Did you mean "frequent"? Python's sporadic releases are a bit more frequent.

Some root cause analysis would be nice. Because whatever went wrong that caused GvR to step down isn'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.

Whatever apology GvR is owed, it's none of my business. The post-BDFL continuity plan is super relevant to me, but I can say with some confidence that GvR does not need me as a witness to whatever psychological remediation he may or may not need for the assignment expression debacle. It's not my place to psychoanalyze him, and he rather clearly didn't ask me to.

So again: why, as a professional who interacts with the Python ecosystem, am I interested in anything more than what is already happening on the thread?

Are you not interested in what caused the leader of a community to step down? Do you not think that that information would be helpful in sustaining the community? This event is not business as usual, it should be considered with great care.

Not really? I'm not suggesting that great care shouldn't be taken; I'm suggesting that there's no evidence that it hasn't, and that neither you nor me are particularly important players in the story of what is happening, and that nobody owes us an explanation. Certainly, a concerted effort to prevent GvR from stepping down as BDFL seems silly.

I'm not implying an effort to prevent GvR from stepping down, but I don't think the lack of public consideration among core devs on why this happened is healthy either.

I don't see it as mystery as why it happened. Perhaps you are thinking there was some specific trigger for his stepping down. I don't think so. When the language becomes as popular as Python has, the head of the project is going to become a target for a lot of unwanted attention. The "assignment expression" PEP was a good example of that but not the sole cause.

Even if infuriating jerks are 0.1% of the population, when your language has hundreds of thousands of users, you are going to deal with a lot of jerks. Frankly, I'm surprised he lasted as long as he did without going mad or something. I would not wish for any of my friends to be subjected to that kind of attention.

We were very lucky to have him leading the project for so long. Python will survive without a BDFL and I hope he enjoys the vacation.

I'm not exactly implying that it's a mystery. Mystery or not it I think it warrants some public consideration. If the reason indeed was 0.1% jerks, that should be confirmed and addressed in writing.

I strongly agree with you, but i think a lot of programmers are so rational that they simply process the information and dont feel anything about it.

It's kind of cold to me, but I know this field is not filled with the emotional types...

If a parent tells their 25 year old child that they’re done with it and sick and tired of the job, I think the child should at least look inside themselves and assess whether anything they did that prompted that should be changed.

If the relationship between GvR and the Python project was some completely different relationship (parent-child, facehugger-host, butterfly-cyclone, etc) then maybe there should be some completely different response. But it's not.

> I'm not suggesting that great care shouldn't be taken; I'm suggesting that there's no evidence that it hasn't, and that neither you nor me are particularly important players in the story of what is happening, and that nobody owes us an explanation.

Completely tangential, but the density of negatives in that sentence was nothing short of majestic.

Why you should care: it's relevant to the post-BDFL continuity plan, because 1) the stressors that pushed GvR out will also act upon the new decisionmakers, 2) those stressors can be reduced, and 3) change-of-control is innately risky and we should be extra-worried (at this moment) about existing, important stressors.

I care that those concerns are being addressed. I do not care whether they're addressed in public in a way designed to mollify any particularized concerns I might have, because I am not a member of the Python core team, and they don't owe me that.

I mean, nobody on the py-committers threads owes you anything. But OP was observing an apparent gap in their thinking -- and indirectly, stating there is a toxic element of culture that destroys leadership morale, which nobody is (publicly) commenting on.

I think you'd say the same, if you agreed that culture was a solvable contributor to GvR's exit (even if you, like me, knew he was leaving for market reasons eventually). By analogy, if 'dang said "I'm leaving yall, this sucks, elect a replacement" and we were like "cool who's it gonna be". That would be an error, and I think you would be at the top of the comment page saying "Also, let's all make some changes so that the next 'dang doesn't have a miserable life."

Avoiding recurrance.

Why do you think something went wrong? He is upset, but the root cause analysis is very simple. It's "GvR is upset <- Python has politics <- Python is large".

A huge thank you is more than deserved, but not an apology. Nobody did anything wrong, GvR's position just stopped being fun because he was too successful.

I imagine they already have opinions about what caused him to step down and either don't consider it a real problem for whomever or whatever succeeds him or at least think it best addressed by that person or people. In other words, figure out the leadership structure and let them deal with it.

>because over the long term the market is going to dictate where Python goes and how it grow

The market didn't give the world any language nearly as readable and approachable for non-programmers.

Isn’t this what always happens though? A remarkle person or small group of people creates something unique and of value. As this thing is adopted by more and more common, unremarkable folk (like me) a market and great demand is created and power over the thing and its creators is established. This power voices opinions and suggestions which in aggregate are a reflection of all the commoditised stuff that already exists. The thing evolves to follow the demands of the market power. The thing is no longer remarkable, its creators move on to the next thing.

You repeat that "The thing evolves to follow the demands of the market power" but that doesn't make it true. You can probably think of counterexamples, likely a dozen off of the top of your head.