> he said his original goal was just to raise $5k to buy a computer. Privately, I was skeptical that the $5k computer had anything to do with Requests. Requests is a small pure-Python library; if you want to work on it, then any cheap laptop is more than sufficient. $5k is the price of a beefy server or top-end gaming rig.

Kenneth Reitz has probably done more to enrich my life than most anyone else who builds things. I wouldn't begrudge him the idea of a nice workstation for his years of labour. Yeah, he's very imperfect, but the author has absolutely lost me

What has he built that you like using that much? Honest question, not being snarky.

I liked Requests way back when but prefer httpx or aiohttp. I liked piping for about a month when it first came out, but jumped ship pretty quickly. I'm not familiar with his other works.

I also wouldn't begrudge the guy a laptop, but I do get what the author was saying. His original fundraiser felt off, like, if you want a nice laptop, just say so, but don't create specious justifications for it.

> I liked Requests way back when but prefer httpx or aiohttp.

Those two tools are modeled after `requests`, so Reitz still has an influence in your life even if you don't use his implementation directly.

They’re pretty close, sure, but Requests itself basically models a web browser. The newer ones model newer browsers (eg with HTTP/2 and async).

Kenneth Reitz has been good and bad at times. And while things of his are genius level, he also has done asshole level things. But on the other hand, we get that with a lot of geniuses for some reason or another. Really smart people can be really dumb too.

It would be like saying, "Don't use Laplace transforms because he did some unsavory thing at some point in time."

Looking at this drama for a bit, I haven't seen anybody advocate for 'canceling' requests itself.

Maybe it's more like: Laplace created awesome things, but let's be fair and also put in his wikipedia page a bit about his political shenanigans.

A lot of of so-called geniuses, especially the self-styled ones with some narcissistic traits, get away with being an asshole. Their admirers have different norms for regular, boring people. I don't think that is fair or healthy for a community.

Back when the drama was fresh, there was a lot of talk about “canceling” Requests, but as often happens, everyone moved o to something else and it kinda got forgotten about with time.

It wasn't really requests that got cancelled, it was pipenv that got cancelled, about the time when Jacob Kaplan-Moss stated that poetry was good. And frankly it was Reitz's actions that directly caused pipenv to be cancelled.

I'm not defending his assholery here, but it's not uncommon in tech.

Take an asshole techie and notice they tend to have devoted fans. It's just possible that Kenneth Reitz didn't get his fan base up before he exposed his personality for who he truly was. Steve Jobs, Zuck, Bill Gates, Linus Torvalds, ... were all called assholes at some point or another. Geez and those people aren't even the worst these days.