[Web-SIG] Re: Just lost another one to Rails

[mike bayer]

I am also opposed to the role as a whole.  Guido created Python,
established himself as the obvious controller of its direction, and then
because he was really good at it, the developers came and it became
popular.  All of us, by choosing to be Python developers, have indivdually
chosen to be part of a community directed by his guidance.

But if someone new is then artifically assigned, without the benefit of
the individual choice we have all made, a similar ability to approve or
reject architectural ideas among that same set of developers, who now have
lots of time and effort invested in the community, towards the goal of
setting the direction for "how will (mostly) everyone do Python web
development next year" as well as "what approaches will most of our
customers and employers expect us to use next year", the decisions of that
direction most certainly will be imposed upon a lot of us; with our own
individual ideas and frameworks marginalized, the only option left is to
find another community.  As we are all hoping the Ruby programming
language is not imposed upon us in the coming years via a similar
mechanism, we would also hope that our own community doesnt decide to
internally squash a large portion of its ideas and diversity, championing
just a small subset of them, through no less than a dictatorship-driven
process.

Also, lets think about what the role really means:  we must choose someone
to oversee the development of a ripoff of some other language's web
platform and establish it as the "one true way to develop web applications
in Python", based solely on the reason that the original has been popular
among junior and mid-level web developers for about 6 months, despite the
fact that its hardly in large-scale production usage anywhere.   Its like
choosing to do your company's website using Ruby on Rails, with all the
risks associated with using a new platform, mulitplied by 10,000 since its
the approach now foisted upon the entire language community as a whole.  I
just find it hard to be optimistic about development that is motivated by
pure reactivity.









>  >>Greg Wilson wrote:
>>>I think Ian Bicking or Michelle Levesque would be good choices for the
>>>role...
>
>> mike bayer wrote:
>> Michelle is currently a computer science undergrad at the university of
>> Toronto.  Are you saying all the people with many years of real-world
>> experience building dynamic web applications and sites for the corporate
>> world and the educational world should be forced to obey the technical
>> direction of a college student with no professional experience ?
>
> Greg Wilson wrote:
> Nope, I didn't say that at all (and I don't think that putting words in
> people's mouths helps this discussion at all).  This is open source: no
> one can "force" anyone to do anything, not even Guido.  I mentioned Ian
> and Michelle because they know the players, have worked with most of the
> candidate systems, and have demonstrated that they're willing to listen
> as well as talk; there are undoubtedly other people who could "play
> Guido" just as well.
>
> Thanks,
> Greg
>
> p.s. Ka-Ping Yee was "just an undergrad" when he started contributing to
> Python; I don't remember anyone thinking that ought to disqualify him.
>
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