Community (A Modest Proposal)

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sun, 13 Jun 2010 22:14:34 +0200, Alf P. Steinbach wrote:

> * Steven D'Aprano, on 13.06.2010 19:57:
>> On Sun, 13 Jun 2010 08:42:57 -0700, rantingrick wrote:
>>
>>> i will start a fork.
>>
>> That is the most sensible thing you have said yet. Please do so, it
>> will be a great thing for the Python community.
> 
> Not nice to quote out of context, there was an "if" and a "then" earlier
> in Rick's sentence.

And regardless of the qualifications he gave, RantingRick starting his 
own fork will be a wonderful thing for oh so many reasons.


> I don't think he'll do it, or if he does, I don't think it will fly.

Please don't discourage him.

What the Python community needs more than anything else right now is for 
RantingRick to create a community of all those who share his vision for 
the future without all the negative energy from those who disagree with 
him. I encourage him to start immediately.


> I don't think it would be possible to establish a
> sufficiently large supportive community for something in direct
> competition with CPython.

The CPython developers (particularly Guido) are explicitly encouraging 
alternate implementations. I can't find the exact quote, but as I 
understand it, Guido's vision is to keep CPython as the reference 
implementation while encouraging people to use whatever implementation 
meets their specific needs, rather than trying to make CPython all things 
for all people.

For example, the moratorium on new features to the language was 
explicitly to give Jython, IronPython and other implementations time to 
catch up to CPython 3.1.

If RantingRick believes that CPython is not going in the direction that 
the community wants, he should create his own implementation. If he 
builds something the community wants, they will come.

If an alternative implementation is too much for him, even a repackaged 
distribution like Komodo or similar would be a great thing. Let him 
repackage CPython with whatever GUI toolkit he thinks the community wants.



-- 
Steven