And large improvements to the language could result in millions of dollars of productivity losses! :-)

I'm not a big fan of "Now this language has gotten popular, let's add all the features to it that made our other language so unpopular."

Everything about language maintenance isn't "just" adding features. There's actual bug fixes and a bunch of other stuff that take a lot of time. Not to mention that Python's standard library is relatively large.

All the evidence is 2 Full Time Developers are equal to the workload. People aren't using Python because it is going to be good enough in the future, it is good enough now.

If more people are working on it full time, we'll just get more Walrus Operators. A very hypothetical gain at cost of an increasingly complex core language.

I always have been and always will be against the walrus operator. I don't care how much anyone tries me to sell it on its elegance. There's just no _need_. It's already the #1 example of wtfpython https://github.com/satwikkansal/wtfpython#-first-things-firs...

/rant. Those kind of features are going to keep coming anyway, I'm afraid.

It's the #1 example of wtfpython for no good reason.

It's like someone used to PHP or JS style coercion, doing: 1 + "2", getting a type error and asking "wtf python?".

The walrus operator is obvious, and very handy in many cases.

The capture part of the pattern matching PEP, on the other hand, has been designed shodilly.

I don’t like the walrus operator personally, but wtfpython has it wrong. It’s simply syntax for an expression that includes a binding. It parses like any other expression, and is completely unsurprising.

It's not about going million miles an hour. The safe speed can be used even if there's 200 people. But the commenter above has a good point: tons of businesses and billions are linked to a product with almost no workforce behind it. The same is with many other OSS: tons of value and no money to those who maintain/create.

If we want to solve this problem we need to start with a way to assign credit and identify neglected parts of the stack. After we have awareness we can find the funds.

Not necessarily. One can be done without another,but it would obviously help if there's some roadmap that can then be shown to the potential sponsors. Getting funding is ultimately a sales function and I'm sure any meaningful project would have enough dough to run on if such function would exist.

It taking 10 years to transition from 2 to 3 wasn't necessarily a bad thing.

Definitely concerns that more hands could make another Angular, which had 2 incompatible branches, with one going from v2 to v11 in 5 years.

> It taking 10 years to transition from 2 to 3 wasn't necessarily a bad thing.

The python3 interpreter could have been largely (or completely) source-compatible with python2 code. They could have done it rust2018 style - where source code files can opt in to a newer parser, and in return get access to the new features. Then the whole python3 drama would have been avoided. MacOS still ships with a python 2.7 interpreter because of all that nonsense.

But if they only had 2 full-time people working on it, no wonder they didn't have the man power to do the transition any other way.

Disappointing.

Which puts a:

> WARNING: Python 2.7 is not recommended.

> This version is included in macOS for compatibility with legacy software.

> Future versions of macOS will not include Python 2.7.

> Instead, it is recommended that you transition to using 'python3' from within Terminal.

banner on launch nowadays...

Right; none of this should be necessary. I don’t need an old version of my C compiler in order to compile old C files. Rust made breaking changes to their language and yet a modern rust compiler will happily compile the older 2015 rust syntax. Python could have gone down the same road; but I suppose all of python’s corporate users chose to fight python compatibility changes locally rather than donate time / money fixing python itself.

Improvements ≠ new features.

because software that is provided for free cannot capture the positive externalities it creates and thus is under-supplied, it's just very straight-forward economics.

Yet it's become such a widespread sentiment to expect software for free that charging for something like Python would probably be seen as obscene and kill the language through loss of reputation alone.

>Its such a statement about the free rider problem that python can have only 2 people working fulltime on it

It's also a big statement about how non realistic were the ideas that FOSS will thrive on volunteers working together.

Back in the day where the "Cathredral and the Bazaar" was published, VALinux got its IPO, and FOSS was the latest hype, people really believed that this will work without corporate sponsorship, just by volunteers doing the work.

Then again, they also believed in many eyes available through the magic of FOSS making bugs shallow (Torvalds), and you get 20+ years of some obvious bug in something as critical as OpenSSL.

Is that actually a bad thing?

Much of the popularity of Python is based upon third party libraries that have been contributed by both individuals and organizations. These are still contributions, and there are many cases where the contributors are paid.

Should Python receive more funding and pay more people to work on the language? Probably, yet it is doubtful that having a large team working on the core language will improve the health of the language.

> And yet ... collectively we can only find enough money to pay two full time salaries?! Seriously?

But what’s the problem here? Is python struggling as a language? If there were clear calls for help companies could find it a lot easier to justify donating money or dev time.

>Is python struggling as a language?

As a language, interpreter, runtime, yes. In terms of adoption, no.

With what? Why haven’t they said so? There are a bunch of tech companies that would love the exposure of employing core developers.

I am seriously wondering: is it actually possible for stock listed companies to donate? I mean aren't they legally obliged not to spend more than necessary (towards their stockholders obliged). Also what does the IRS say on that?

No. This is a misinterpretation of the responsibility. Companies have great latitude in what they do, as long as they're forthright.

They have a duty to try to operate efficiently, but that doesn't make corporate social responsibility, a bad hire, or wasting something nobody liked in the canteen illegal.

Well, bad hire, bad food can always be justified (avoiding hindsight fallacy). But giving away money for nothing received (meaning of donation) is something different (at least to me)

companies donate money to stuff all the time what are you on about?

So I read up a little. To tax deduct the nonprofit must have registered as 501(c)(3). Is this the case here?

I can pay you to put my company name on your business website or a physical banner at a trade show and account for this as a business expense (deduct it) without you being a non-profit. I have broad latitude to make business expenditures in a manner that I believe is profit-seeking or optimizing for my business.

People do this with Google and Facebook all the time. We call them ads. Not every ad campaign has a positive RoI.

Yes, its possible, and, yes, they actually do. And the IRS is fine with it.

To me that is more like evidence of a well-engineered codebase.

Python is as popular as it is because it's free, not because it's good. If companies had to contribute, many would pick something else.

So... why don't you pay?

I say this as someone who's spent decades of my life donating time to opensource projects. - But the model where big companies have their technology stacks underpinned by charity is ridiculous. Obviously ridiculous, if python only has 2 full-time-equivalent staff.

This problem isn't solved by little old me pulling out my check book. My bank and my insurance company don't need charity from me in order to fund the technology they've built their businesses on. They need to learn to pony up and start funding the "free" software they use. Paying myself would only help kick the can down the road - and encourage and enable this sort of corporate mooching to keep happening.

In 60 years most of the volunteer maintainers of the software we depend on every day will be dead. Some time between now and then we need solution to this problem of opensource sustainability. Delaying buys us nothing.

If python continues to be this popular, there will be more maintainers who join the project.

Surely you’ve seen volunteers join existing projects out of their own interest and need now. The decades that you contributed (thank you, BTW): were those all on projects you started, or did you also join some existing efforts?

I don’t see any reason to think that will stop in 10, 20, or 60 years.

> If python continues to be this popular, there will be more maintainers who join the project.

Will there? I feel like most of the opensource attention flows gradually up stack / toward trendy things on github and away from infrastructure older than github. When heartbleed happened a few years ago it was revealed that OpenSSL was maintained by basically one guy. The same is true of the linux timezone database. Apparently python is mostly 2 people.

I'd put money on this being is a theme for lots of tools we take for granted. How many people work on bash? Or busybox, grub, libpthread or libicu? I bet the number is tiny.

Cpython had 5 pull requests opened yesterday. 6 the day before that (from 10 total distinct contributors). That doesn’t seem like a project starving for contributors. If everyone with commit access up and quit, there’d be turmoil for several weeks and something reasonable would emerge.

People want to work on popular, useful things. Python is both of those.

> the model where big companies have their technology stacks underpinned by charity is ridiculous

Worse: they are exploiting people's good intentions.

They co-opted the Free Software movement.

Copyleft has been painted as "business-unfriendly" and replaced with permissive licenses - aka unpaid labor without "strings attached".

> They need to learn to pony up and start funding the "free" software they use

...instead they even dodge taxes.

Why do you assume he isn't paying? The payment should obviously be proportional, though. You can't expect a single individual to finance what a gigantic multibillion corporation could.

Just because some random individual came up with some arbitratry agenda of whom should finance what, doesn't mean that it makes sense.

There are so many better (and worse) things to finance than Python Foundation.

It's not very arbitrary. The reasoning (in one of the upstream posts) is that Python is one of the world's most used programming languages. It definitely makes sense for large multi-billion corporations which are the users of this language to help finance it.

Your point would make more sense if the claim was that a significant portion of the corporation's profits should go towards financing Python. Then I would agree that "there are so many better things to finance than Python". But if we're discussing a salary or two in the context of corporations that employ hundreds of thousands of people, then your argument makes much less sense in the current context. There are very few things that would have better marginal utility then paying for the (effectively) third full-time Python developer.

Someone else should!