re bad leadership

[Paul Boddie]

"Terry Reedy" <tjreedy at home.com> wrote in message news:<IGZ77.30629$EP6.7882998 at news1.rdc2.pa.home.com>...
> "Paul Boddie" <paul at boddie.net> wrote in message
> news:23891c90.0107260053.70747d65 at posting.google.com...

[...]

> > I think such "ideological" changes to the language with
> > such limited justification send the message to numerous
> > highly-respected community members that their work is
> > considered to be of little value and can be sacrificed
> > to the "language gods" on a whim.
> 
> Is this a one-time gift/sacrifice, of this magnitude, in return for
> Guido's gift of Python, or the first of a long series?  I'll let Guido
> answer by word and ultimately by deed as he chooses.

It's probably best to leave the whole "gift culture" model out of
this, just to avoid the usual tedious distractions which have plagued
many of the threads about PEP 238. I won't even air my own opinions on
the accuracy or relevance of that model.

I have said it before, and I'll repeat myself: I'm very grateful to
everyone who has made Python the language it is today, just as I am
grateful to everyone who made it the language it was when I started
using it in 1995. I don't consider myself a high profile user, or
anyone who has contributed very much at all to the community, so
whilst I want to have my views on this and other issues taken into
consideration, I can hardly expect it.

But this is a large community of people who have produced considerable
amounts of useful work. It is true that they might not have produced
such work if they had not been able to use Python, and it is true that
they have Guido and company to thank for producing the tool which
allowed them to commence that work. However, Python itself has
benefited from having useful software available for it. It's probably
true that the vast majority of open source projects don't ever reach
the "critical mass" to ensure near-guaranteed long-term development;
so Python didn't get where it is today purely on merit as a language
concept.

Ideally, the community should be grateful to Python's inventors, just
as Python's inventors should be grateful to the community. One could
argue that one party doesn't owe the other anything: Python's
inventors are just doing something which interests them and if one
wants to come along for the ride, then one has to put up with the
company; users of Python have many choices of language and platform,
so the inventors should be grateful that their invention has been
chosen, and be attentive to those developers in order to keep their
invention "competitive".

To shut the other party out does show a fair amount of disrespect.
Python's inventors are only able to work on Python because Python has
been a successful component in a number of products; most Python users
probably cannot make a living out of writing and working on Python.
Python's users are only able to use Python because its inventors have
dedicated their skills to a freely-available language and not to
making "dot com fortunes".

Both parties are therefore fortunate because of their interaction with
each other. This should be considered when, inevitably, the legitimate
concerns of any individual are publicly belittled on comp.lang.python
because they are not expressing the "acceptable" point of view.

Paul