[Python-ideas] A bit meta

[Guido van Rossum]

On Fri, Jan 29, 2016 at 8:10 PM, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 29, 2016 at 05:56:57PM +0000, Brett Cannon wrote:
>
>> A better fit would be something like https://www.uservoice.com/ if people
>> wanted a focused "vote on ideas" solution,
>
> I don't think treating language design as a participatory democracy
> would be a good idea, even if it were practical. (How could you get all
> Python users to vote? Do casual users who only use Python occasionally
> get fractional votes?) If it were, Python would probably look and behave
> a lot more like PHP.
>
> And even representative democracy has practical problems. (Who speaks
> for the users of numpy? Sys admins? Teachers?)
>
> I'm 100% in favour of community participation and would like to
> encourage people to participate and be heard, but I don't think we
> should have any illusions about the fundamentally non-democratic nature
> of language design. Nor do I think that's necessarily a bad thing. Not
> everything needs to be decided by voting.
>
> I think it is far more honest to admit that language design is always
> going to be an authoritarian process where a small elite, possibly even
> a single person, decides what makes it into the language and what
> doesn't, than to try to claim democratic legitimcy via voting that
> cannot possibly be representative.
>
>
>
>> or something like
>> https://www.discourse.org/ for a more modern forum platform that has the
>> concept of likes for a thread.
>
> Ah, "like" buttons. The way to feel good about yourself for
> participating without actually participating :-)
>
> Well, I suppose it's a bit less disruptive than having hordes of
> "Me too!!!1!" posts.

Let me clarify why I like StackExchange. I don't care about the voting
for/against answers or even about the selection of the "best" answer
by the OP. I do like that the reputation system of the site
automatically recognizes users who should be given more
responsibilities (up to and including deleting inappropriate posts --
rarely). What I like most is that the site encourages the creation of
artifacts that are useful to reference later, e.g. when a related
issue comes up again later. And I think it will be easier for new
folks to participate than the current mailing list (where if you don't
sign up for it you're likely to miss most replies, while if you do
sign up, you'll be inundated with traffic -- not everybody is a wizard
at managing high volume mailing list traffic).

I don't understand the issues brought up about the SE site creation
process. 22 years ago we managed to create a Usenet newsgroup,
comp.lang.python. Surely today we can figure out how to create a SE
site?

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)