A post by Guido van Rossum removed for violating Python community guidelines
discuss.python.orgThe original text stated:
> I don’t know much about voting systems, but I know someone who does. Unfortunately he’s currently banned. Maybe we can wait until his 3-month ban expires and ask him for advice?
Currently, the text reads:
> This post was flagged by the community and is temporarily hidden.
Since it has been hidden for more than 24 hours, this suggests that a moderator action has marked it as permanently hidden. Due to a recent decision, this means no one outside of the moderators or admins can view it: https://discuss.python.org/t/moderated-posts-are-no-longer-p...
Edit: I meant to post slightly more direct link in title: https://discuss.python.org/t/should-we-consider-ranked-choic...
Edit 2: Some comments suggest that Guido was banned from posting, but this is not accurate. I have edited the title from "Guido van Rossum's Post Removed for Violating Python Community Guidelines" to "A Post by Guido van Rossum Removed for Violating Python Community Guidelines" to clarify what actually happened.
I'm an outsider who only knows Guido van Rossum by way of interviews his writing.
Assuming your quote is what the original text said (I don't disbelieve you-- but nobody can see it to confirm) why would this have violated community standards? Is there some rule about not mentioning "un-persons" or something?
It's very confusing.
Edit: Answering my own question. There appears to be a kerfuffle afoot. Apparently the Steering Council has suspended a core developer for 3 months[0] but isn't naming the suspended developer or citing specific reasons why (per [1] and sparking a call for a vote of no confidence in the council which did not succeed).
Apparently even mentioning the suspended person (without naming them) is enough for even Guido van Rossum to be censored. Wow.
Edit 2: The suspended developer is Tim Peters[3].
Edit 3: Altered paragraph "Edit:" from "...or the reason why[1] (" to "...or citing specific reasons why (per [1]".
Edit 4: Added "which did not succeed" after "...vote of no confidence in the council".
[0] https://discuss.python.org/t/three-month-suspension-for-a-co...
[1] https://discuss.python.org/t/calling-for-a-vote-of-no-confid...
[3] https://chrismcdonough.substack.com/p/the-shameful-defenestr...
That's kinda nuts, but kinda absolutely in line with all trends of the last 5 years. I remember similar shit happening in Linux community (the shit won, naturally).
But, anyway, who is the "Steering Council" and how come they have more influence than the 2 people who basically created python the language and python the community?
When Guido stopped being the sole leader (BDFL) he was replaced by the steering council which is elected and has the purpose of doing the following (Defined in PEP 13 which is the current governance model of Python. Right now Guido is a core developer at this time. See https://peps.python.org/pep-0013/#the-steering-council
That's pretty obvious. The question was, who are these people, specifically, and why they were chosen and given that much power. I mean, I can see the names, but while I don't have to be told who Tim Peters or Guido van Rossum are, I have no clue who these guys are and what their actual contributions are.
Gregory P. Smith Emily Morehouse Barry Warsaw Thomas Wouter
I've worked with gps and twouter before at Google; they were two of the leaders of the python ecosystem. twouter is a highly technically skilled contributor- when I found a 2 bugs in the Python runtime, he was the person who helped me fix them (bug 1: RPC calls from C++ to Python delivered during interpreter shutdown caused crash, bug 2: importing the same library twice with two different names caused crash) upstream.
gps apparently is a core contributor to cpython but I he did mainly administrative work afaict when I was at Google. From what I can tell, gps is the primary instigator in this incident.
Barry Warsaw: was lead maintainer of jython, I think also involved in the guts of cpython for some time.
Emily Morehouse: I hadn't heard of her before but it looks like she is a core python developer: https://emilyemorehouse.com/blog/015-my-path-to-becoming-a-p... who implemented some key PEPs.
That's what happens when Googlers have power these days. They are so used to censorship being forced down their throats at Google that it seems super normal for them to do it everywhere.
In line with the trends, as the grandparent said. People who claim tolerance are intolerant
There is an election process, and all core python team members vote on the SC (https://peps.python.org/pep-8105/#results) for a 1-year term.
Greg, Thomas, and Barry are all old guard (20+ years as core devs), Emily and Pablo are relatively more recent, but still have 5+ years as core devs and are I believe more actively doing python feature development. All of these folks have served on the steering council before, some for 3-4 years.
Guido has served on the SC before, but has been stepping back recently.
I don't have a factual answer for you (be interested in one, too), only a cheek-in-tongue one: It's like politics, the only thing you have to do to get elected is to get people to vote for you. And often the vote is only among people who _want_ to be elected (and in a position of power), massively reducing the pool of good candidates.
> The question was, who are these people, specifically, and why they were chosen and given that much power.
They are core developers elected by an internal process among the developers. See PEP 13 for details: https://peps.python.org/pep-0013/#the-steering-council
> I have no clue who these guys are and what their actual contributions are.
Barry Warsaw (https://barry.warsaw.us) is another of the "old guard" who can be pictured standing next to Peters and GvR fairly easily. He gained the title of "Friendly Language Uncle For Life" (FLUFL), and has previously been the project lead for Mailman and lead maintainer for Jython. He was the release manager for Python 2.2 (as far as I can tell, the first time this position existed), 2.6 and 3.0, and shared the role for 2.3. His name is all over 2.x-era process documentation. Prior to GvR's actual retirement in 2018, there was an April Fools' Day announcement of his resignation in 2009, authored by Barry Warsaw and Brett Cannon. This was accompanied by a hidden option (still available!) which changes the `!=` syntax to `<>`. Refs: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4007289/ ; https://peps.python.org/pep-0401/ .
Emily Morehouse (https://emilyemorehouse.com/) was the PyCon co-chair for 2019 and chair for 2020 and 2021. She has done project management for Axios and mentoring for PyLadies (https://discuss.python.org/t/steering-council-nomination-emi...).
Gregory P. Smith has been a core dev since about 2003 and has notably worked on `hashlib` and `subprocess` (https://discuss.python.org/t/steering-council-nomination-gre...).
Pablo Galindo Salgado (https://github.com/pablogsal) was the release manager for 3.10 and 3.11, and Thomas Wouters was/is the release manager for 3.12 and 3.13. Wouters has also previously served as a PSF Board member and was a PSF founder (https://www.python.org/nominations/elections/2020-python-sof...).
Looks like some kind of power play...
Originally discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41234180
My experience is that discussions of bylaw changes tend to get heated and that trying to change your bylaws is like Russian Roulette, that is maybe 1/6 of the time there is some disaster which is either the end of he organization or that results in a major loss of members.
Wow, just wow. Reading all these makes me really worried about supporting anything built on Python long term. This creates an impression of a self-destructing dying community.
This is silly. The Python Foundation could die tonight and people will still build in Python for years to come because believe it or not, most people do not know or care about the happenings of these organizations.
Yeah, but my experience with Perl shows, once something like this happens, its pretty much downhill from there.
Not saying Python is going away tomorrow, in fact it might remain actively developed and used for decades to come. But with proactive thought, improvement and initiative gone. Competition will replace you in time. That's just how it works.
Also see for the last python release notes for some hardcore politics injected right into your tooling language. Python is unfortunately radioactive and can't be used responsibly anymore. They're halfway to selfdestruction
What specifically are you talking about? I couldn’t find anything political in the Python 3.12 release notes.
They probably mean the poem at the bottom here:
https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3120/
Under "And now for something completely different"
Ah. That’s really inappropriate for a technical document.
Unnecessary politics in certain tech spheres is still a norm.
For example, here's GNOME the desktop being concerned about climate change:
https://discourse.gnome.org/t/question-to-candidates-the-boa...
It seems like the point is, you can see the same issue in very different ways. Did you read it from the bottom to the top? I was cringing until I got to the end and found the message to “Now read it bottom to top”. Still not saying it belongs in a technical document but it felt way less abrasive after reading it both directions.
The spicy bit is that this is the first release that contained such a political message. And also the first one that is managed by the guy who started the mess of this post, too! Not exactly sure if he's the one who put it in there, but it's one heck of a coincidence.
What the hell, has everyone caught and gone gung-ho on censorship? What the actual f*** is this?
How in the hell do you have the balls or ovaries to ban the creator --for something so inane. It's like a highscool supe who gets no respect and will at every chance show you the little power she has in such a classless way. So utterly petty defying belief.
I hope those dweebs get voted out pronto. That's an absurd abuse of power.
People who trip like that have no business having any power or control.
Most people haven't gone crazy, the kinds of people on this board are experts in silencing dissent and making it appear that way. I really hope the Python community can hold an open poll or discussion on a forum not controlled by the fascists and force the board to resign.
> gung-ho on censorship? What the actual f** is this?
Unintenti**l irony
I hope that's just a rib. Else, one should be able to tell self control over stamping authority over others. Very few people openly speak their inner monologue, uncensored just releasing their stream of consciousness like a delirious hobo down a stench filled alleyway.
I speak my "inner monologue" and it is nothing like delirium or stench. Not sure who you are or who you're hanging out with, but better to get the stench out than let it fester.
It was funny that you censored yourself, in a comment about censorship, that's all :-)
You did have any opportunity to rewrite your sentence to use any other word than f**, one that did not require self-censoring. Yet you did not. Why?
there's a difference between being polite and having your post removed entirely
Of course, but it still elicits a reasonable chuckle.
> It's like a highscool supe who gets no respect and will at every chance show you the little power
Sayre's Law, effectively, the smaller the stakes the bigger the fights/politics.
See also: HOAs, academia.
Re: the vote of no confidence [1]. Looks like most devs disagreed with the vote and have opted to let the council continue but transfer the "HR" Code of Conduct duties to the PSF.
[1] https://discuss.python.org/t/calling-for-a-vote-of-no-confid...
They suspended Tim Peters? That is insane.
The Python steering committee also threw the kitchen sink of accusations at him. IMO it speaks to character when you throw arguments like an adversarial lawyer. Not the kind of person you want to be around for work or life.
To be clear, the accusations in question came from the Code of Conduct Work Group; the Steering Council simply "acted on their recommendations".
I don't expect any positive changes if said Work Group becomes directly responsible for such disciplinary actions.
is the steering council able to remove messages without a recommendation? i think that if two "independent" groups have to cooperate then that's better than one group being able to act alone. now the question is how independent are these groups really. i saw another comment drawing that into question.
I don't understand why you said they didn't explain the reason for the 3-month ban. Your link [0] lays out the reasons.
I badly paraphrased what citation [1] said. I've dropped on an edit. (I have no dog in this race, other than thinking that Python is a pretty important software project. I didn't mean to editorialize.)
> why would this have violated community standards? Is there some rule about not mentioning "un-persons" or something?
Flags may be cast by anyone, and this will eventually result in automatic hiding - flags on Discourse are weighted according to the "trust level" of those raising them.
My guess is that people perceived this as a passive-aggressive objection to Tim Peters' suspension. It has definitely been permitted up until now to refer to this (although everyone seemed to be avoiding the name on principle), but there seems to be an expectation that people should "read the air" now and stop talking about it - hence posts like https://discuss.python.org/t/moderated-posts-are-no-longer-p... and https://discuss.python.org/t/pr-disaster-surrounding-recent-... .
> and sparking a call for a vote of no confidence in the council which did not succeed
The call was retracted, which is not surprising. The Steering Council isn't the root of the problem, anyway. That would be the Code of Conduct Work Group (https://www.python.org/psf/workgroups/#code-of-conduct-work-...), which is not elected (https://wiki.python.org/psf/ConductWG/Charter#Membership), has membership overlapping other important groups (4 of them are on the PSF Board of Directors - https://www.python.org/psf/board/#id3 - and Brett Cannon and Łukasz Langa are Discourse forum moderators) and enforces the Code of Conduct according to hidden rules that betray the neutrality of that document (https://policies.python.org/python.org/code-of-conduct/Enfor...) counter to the wishes of one of the original drafters of said document (https://discuss.python.org/t/why-i-am-withdrawing-fellowship... ; https://discuss.python.org/t/why-im-leaving-discuss-python-o... etc.).
It's also noteworthy that the Steering Council - consisting of 5 core devs - apparently also now requires a "communications liaison" (https://www.notion.so/46aec24028fd4e8dbdba003097c18b5b?pvs=2...) who gets a glowing write-up in official updates on the forum (such as https://discuss.python.org/t/steering-council-updates-for-ju...) - which are not posted by said liaison. I have no idea why this should be necessary, nor is there anything in PEP 13 (https://peps.python.org/pep-0013/) about this position existing. It seems that this person was selected entirely out-of-process.
Wonder if the moderators heard about the Streisand Effect. It’s a good time to learn about it.
> I don’t know much about voting systems, but I know someone who does. Unfortunately he’s currently banned. Maybe we can wait until his 3-month ban expires and ask him for advice?
So he was banned for asking about someone who knows about voting. Transitive meta banning? I guess anyone asking about Guido’s post will also get banned.
> this means no one outside of the moderators or admins can view it
Imo that kind of deliberate intransparency is a massive red flag. Here for example I can choose to see hidden comments and make up my own mind about the content, which is excellent. Even if I don't use the feature, the fact that I could if I wanted to is a massive plus for trust in the process.
This post was unflagged few moments ago, also received 20 likes (from 7 to 27) for last hour.
Probably because it gained attention on HN?
The same cannot be said for in-numerous other acts of flagging and hiding. Almost all posts from Clay in this thread has been flagged and hidden; you can't even make sense of Guido's replies to him because of that.
https://discuss.python.org/t/approval-voting-vs-instant-runo...
Looks like they were restored right after you posted this link.
Thanks for the update, unfortunately I can no longer edit my top comment or title to reflect this.
Would be happy for admin to do so, if that's something that's done on this site.
Are we all going to get banned for mentioning a post that mentions a ban?
FWIW, the post appears to have been restored. The cited original text is visible presently.
Your two versions of the title say the same thing.
These are not "Python community guidelines". These are the guidelines of a tyrannical clique who have grabbed power and control the access to the infrastructure.
They abuse their power by banning any opposition and then using said infrastructure to libel and defame their opponents.
Google already fired one or two of them. I do not know what is required to restore the health of Python.
>Google already fired one or two of them.
I would appreciate more information about this.
It's funny how drama, toxicity and speech suppresion ensues as soon as you establish a CoC and let a bunch of SJWs enforce it. Every. Single. Time.
I would like to see more instances of this kind of thing going on, the fallout, and so on.
NixOS drama is the most recent instance: https://chrismcdonough.substack.com/p/the-nixos-conflict-in-...
Similarly (un)funny how the technology behind blockchains, formal verification, and decentralization is ridiculed on the basis of inefficiency etc., Every. Single. Time. given such a governance structure would be so much harder for the legalese power trippers to regulatory capture...
What are you talking about? Were you around for the DAO moment a few years ago? Anyone who had a lot of crypto could powertrip and effectively veto any vote.
again, cryptography is not crypto, yes I remember the DAO, but no I didnt say buying democracy. I said using the technology behind blockchains.
Any rules of order or organizational structure could be formulated in say metamath as formal sentences and a UI built around it so that people can take steps and make decisions and prove they are entitled to do so.
a malicious actor should fail to be able to prove undeserved powers in a properly formulated formal system.
none of this censorship nonsense
Fired who?
This is Guido. I can assure you there was nothing nefarious. The incident is best described as moderation automation misfiring. The post was restored and a moderator has apologized for the mishap.
Thanks for clarifying! I'm surprised this is your first post here. If they do ever ban you over there, we'd be honoured to have you around ;)
"We've found a witch may we burn her?!" -- Monty Python and the Holy Grail (also the PSF lately)
https://youtu.be/X2xlQaimsGg?feature=shared&t=13
FYI, Python is named after Monty Python , who got into all kinds of trouble making fun of and saying things that upset basically everyone (religion to LGBT), which is ironic considering the circumstances.
My spidey sense first got tingling a few years ago when the Python powers decided they were going to rename their git master branch to something else. Caused them unnecessary work and to this day it's not certain any developer or user actually asked for it. The word has multiple meanings of course; yet felt like a symbolic gesture to alleviate guilt totally unrelated to Python.
I didn't complain without a dog in the hunt, but I noticed those that did were implied to be monsters, and told that their mild disagreement "would not look good to history." Unfortunately a few years later I can say the opposite.
Well, Guido made his bed, now it's time to lie in it. ;-)
>Unfortunately a few years later I can say the opposite.
It's your contention that people getting up in arms about not changing the name of the 'master' branch specifically look good now, with hindsight? Can't say I agree.
You’ve reframed the disagreement about unnecessary work as “up in arms.” They look like sane folks who recommended not doing purely symbolic work.
Something substantial perhaps, say promoting under-represented folks within psf would be something. You can’t eat branch names.
For what it's worth, David Mertz would agree with you (https://discuss.python.org/t/why-im-leaving-discuss-python-o...).
He got kicked out, too.
That the people implying they were monsters were the actual monsters.
We can mostly agree that the people acting on the irresistible urge to rename git branches specifically look bad now.
Turns out it's a slippery slope, who would've thunk.
Very sad to see this happening to the Python community. Maybe we need a fork with only technical discussion allowed. This CoC/vote stuff seems to poison every community it touches.
I think the politics of power is unavoidable no matter how well you silo your technical work from your people work.
Ten years ago, Debian saw three well respected members of the Technical Committee resign — including two former project leaders, one of whom designed the .deb packaging system — during what I see as a similarly heated vote/counter-vote power struggle. This Python saga feels similar.
BDFL model seems to have worked pretty well for so many decades. Guido should have just transferred power to someone he trusted. Now look at him, he can't even comment freely.
This is a tough one. Guido was excellent at his role, and his decision to hand it over was a mature one. It was everybody's hope it would help to guarantee long-term future for Python, independent from corporate greed.
Now these new folks seems to be failing at the only job they had. Maybe they need more time to mature, or maybe the Python Community should take a more decisive stance towards this kind of abuse of power.
I think the lesson is, if you should ever find yourself in the role of a BD and plan to give up control in favour of a committee or suchlike, always retain the option to throw them out and re-assume control, in case of need.
Ah the old Oliver Cromwell approach!
Yeah because after that you just have 5-10 dictators which inevitable build up cliques with their own personal grievances rather than any ideas to benefit the good of the community.
I believe if things get too heated, all the parties involved should be forced to meet in person for a weekend to talk things out. I'm sure it would solve like 90% of these stupid conflicts, because people rarely get _that_ riled up when in the same room. Written communication, especially asynchronus ones like email or forums, are just unsuitable to capture all nuances of human behaviour. Someone is tired or hungry and makes a bad joke; next thing you know there's a witchhunt…
(I also don't think they should be allowed to cite things said 5 years ago as a reason to ban someone today. How could that still be relevant?)
> (I also don't think they should be allowed to cite things said 5 years ago as a reason to ban someone today. How could that still be relevant?)
Out of curiosity, since similar arguments come up fairly regularly: What is the appropriate time limit, do you think?
This type of behavior is abusing the members of the community. Code of conducts should contain language to dissuade bureaucrats from participating and especially from attempts at grabbing power.
As well as a straightforward way to report bureaucrats and have them removed from the community.
Based on the same process as other abuses that may already be included int the code of conduct.
You can vote your way into a CoC but you need to fork your way out.
When Codes of Conduct were first introduced, they sounded like a benign concept. But now it's becoming increasing clear that they're the Trojan horse that allows the inmates to take over the asylum.
This seems to be a repeating theme lately. NixOS went through something incredibly similar lately.
I miss that information, have you a link to share ?
A 5 minute overview, https://chrismcdonough.substack.com/p/the-nixos-conflict-in-...
Another overview (easy to understand, but some non-central information is inaccurate), https://lunduke.locals.com/post/5819317/nixos-commits-a-purg...
Concrete events & evidences, https://github.com/nrdxp/rfc-evidence/blob/master/rfc_eviden...
Prior discussion on HN
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40166912
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40107370
Discussion on /r/NixOS
https://old.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/1ed5gbc/the_nixos_co...
Note that that is from very early on in the process. The last I heard (about a month ago?) the final result was several (many of? more than 3, less than all?) people who signed the letter mentioned in the Reg article left for various reasons, several right at the point when a certain person had their commit-status re-enabled after a ban. I believe said person was eventually banned at a later point.
There are at least 2 forks that happened seemingly as a result of these disputes (Aux, as mentioned in the Reg article and Lix)
> This is a repository that aims to concisely explain the issues in Nix community
This kind of drama seems to exist very specifically to programming language design and implementation.
Probably has something to do with the codified formal structures necessary for various committees/ decision making groups.
But it's interesting. This kind of stuff happens in ECMA, Rust, Python and a few others. Go seems to have escaped. Maybe because it's a corporate owned Lang? Similarly no drama in the Typescript world.
Corporate drama happens behind closed doors. It’s in the best interests of everyone at the company to present a unified vision, so that’s what happens.
Additionally, corporate structure is typically much more hierarchical. If someone has a complaint they can take it up with Anders, if he disagrees that’s it (unless your name happens to be Scott G or Satya N). This is, by and large, a good and efficient way to structure things.
A prominent and influential Go developer was effectively banned for life from Go community forums some years back. I honestly don't remember enough of the details to have a clear opinion on whether it was ultimately warranted, but I still feel sad that it happened when I think about it from time to time. The fact that it's legitimately unwise to discuss and decide CoC violations in public can make the resulting disappearances relatively invisible.
I actually just re-read that whole thread earlier this evening for unrelated reasons: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31508000
In short, the Go module proxy causes an excessive traffic volume on git VCS sources with frequent clones of unchanged repos. Regardless of whether or not the developer is/was always reasonable in how he discussed this, he was absolutely right about this being a hostile behavior from the official Go proxy that is the result of bad/insufficient engineering. The team's suggestions to simply stop refreshing his one domain were also not sufficient given that the problem clearly impacts all Go module VCS hosts.
The developer also appeared to be banned in a way that violated the Go CoC's own provisions around fair notice and a proper hearing, which is super disappointing to see.
Oh man, was Drew banned from all Go spaces, or just from the issue tracker as he mentioned? He seems to draw ire, although whenever I actually read what he writes, he usually makes a lot of sense. I imagine there are examples of him being abrasive, but it usually seems like he values being thoughtful and kind.
I was actually thinking of someone else: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34311643
To take a stab at my perception of why this is: Its the same reason why everyone and their mother has an opinion on note taking; programming language design is a topic that has a comparatively low skill floor to have an opinion on. Its difficult to have an opinion on how, I don't even know, drivers should communicate with each other in the linux kernel, see I can't even come up with a great example of the kinds of discussions they have because the skill floor is reasonably high. Its more common to hear "We gotta bring Rust to linux"; even more common still is "Rust is too complicated" "too verbose" "we should change X Y Z" whatever.
>This kind of drama seems to exist very specifically to programming language design and implementation.
There's that saying about the inverse correlation between impact of the project/the stakes, and people being drama lords.
I saw this in the re-enactment scene in the UK in the 80's and 90's [0], where there were endless schisms and political dramas. The same is true of any "scene" where the consequences of drama are minor and the participants have the scene as a core part of their identity.
I would expect there to be a class of admin in here that do not actually contribute code but have created positions of authority over the project based on "community contribution" only. There's a particular type of person that does this and derives great satisfaction from it. I'm not going to criticise this - often the "community contribution" is real and beneficial - but I don't think it helps when the focus of the team managing the project moves away from the purely technical.
[0] I'm sure it still happens, but I no longer witness it.
No drama in C that I can remember either, because there is not much of a "community" in the first place.
There's a community, just too busy with the actual programming.
There's an online community for Cosmopolitan C on places like Discord. Everyone who's there, is there because I welcome them and want them to be there. The code of conduct is you have to behave like Mr. Rogers. There's no sexism, racism, name it. The C developers in our community don't even use swear words.
This drama exists in nearly every human committee in existence.
My personal conspiracy theory is that it is the corporations demanding the codes of conduct as a form of sabotage for products that they can't control.
He should have stayed on as BDFL. Now in the power vacuum a bunch of “activists” and political enthusiasts will take over and ruin the whole thing for everyone, or at least significantly slow down the progress
I'm glad he's stepped down. His opinion matters to be sure, but python needs to be a community developed language. He's a smart guy, and he matters still to the python community.
There was a tremendous amount of frustration around the walrus operator, which led to him stepping down.
It was happening a lot under Guido too, but IMO, Python was arguably a better language (at least in some ways) 10, 15, even 20 years ago. Python's three super powers were readability, simplicity, and a vast standard library that negated the need for most projects to seek out third party modules.
All three of those have declined. It's less readable than it used to be, it's definitely more complicated (not just complex, complicated), and the standard library is declining rapidly in relevance as it ages.
And it wasn't just Guido. Tim was a big advocate for all three of those super powers when he was more influential. They banned Tim and they censored Guido, so go figure.
> All three of those have declined. It's less readable than it used to be, it's definitely more complicated (not just complex, complicated), and the standard library is declining rapidly in relevance as it ages.
I find it much more readable, and more importantly more expressive. Certain new features are missteps IMO, but I just don't use them. But more importantly, the language has been moving away from cryptic %-encodings and other C idioms.
As for the standard library, that was already happening for a long time, and is inevitable. The world has fundamentally changed. In Python's heyday it was much harder to download and install and use a third-party library, so a rich standard library was an asset. Now it's full of specialized code that handles obscure and increasingly irrelevant data formats; multiple overlapping hacks for binary data; terrible and confusing date support; awkward interfaces that haven't stood the test of time (particularly all the networking stuff; Requests is one of the most downloaded PyPI packages, along with its dependencies which are probably almost never downloaded for any other reason); etc.
Lots of people still seem to think that the 2->3 migration was a mistake. They couldn't be more wrong. The old way of handling "strings" was abysmal, and spit in the face of the Zen. Error messages were confusing and implicit conversions abounded.
Also, just for the record: Guido van Rossum was in favour of the walrus operator. In fact, he co-authored the PEP (https://peps.python.org/pep-0572/), along with Tim Peters.
The walrus operator is nice, except in comprehensions. f-strings are great, except for the `=` debugging operator. Dictionary merging and update operators contradict the "one way to do it" with weird and confusing syntax that's completely redundant to methods that already exist.
Type hints are a sore spot for me. They're good enough when you just don't remember whether an argument is an object or a string, for example, but once you start type hinting deep into data structures, your hints become a mangled soup of nonsense for basically no real benefit. Typing errors are a rare occurrence—perhaps once a year in most projects—yet we clutter our codebases with verbosity to satisfy type checkers instead of prioritizing clarity for developers.
There's a lot that's just straight up redundant. Dicts are ordered now, but is OrderedDict deprecated? No, because it's just slightly different in weird and mostly unimportant ways. `frozenset` is a builtin, for all 3 programmers worldwide who use it. Python resisted match/case syntax for decades, but when it finally arrived, it did so in a way that’s anything but standard—good luck figuring it out without consulting the documentation.
Obviously some improvements are real. Every new version of Python brings valuable enhancements. But just go back to Python as it used to be -- pseudocode that runs. That's just not true anymore. The simplicity has slipped away and will never ever come back.
And the standard library? A very real problem, right now, in computer security is the software supply chain. Remember polyfill from like, yesterday? This is the era when we should double down on having a million dependencies from all over GitHub, from unknown developers with no commitment, because ... npm's hellscape is a model to follow?
I would argue the contrary. There's dependency hell, of course, but there's also dependency risk. If you were evaluating a product right now, and you saw its lockfile depended only on a specific version of the Python Standard Library, that gives you exactly 1 product to evaluate, exactly 1 team of developers to depend on. pip is great and all, but dependency resolvers have quietly let in a hundred trojan horses and a thousand unmaintained dependencies into tons of projects, and no one noticed it was even happening.
Python in 2005, when everyone depended on the standard library, was a safer place than npm is today.
> f-strings are great, except for the `=` debugging operator
What's wrong with `=` debugging operator in f-strings?
>Dictionary merging and update operators contradict the "one way to do it" with weird and confusing syntax that's completely redundant to methods that already exist.
I find the unpacking syntax elegant. There are yet more unrealized possible generalizations of it that I can think of.
> Type hints are a sore spot for me.... Python resisted match/case syntax for decades, but when it finally arrived, it did so in a way that’s anything but standard
Many people expect match/case to be "a switch statement" but it really is not designed for this purpose. I agree that it's an awkward fit and I don't use it. Similarly, I only use type annotations for documentation purposes.
> Dicts are ordered now, but is OrderedDict deprecated? No, because it's just slightly different in weird and mostly unimportant ways.
Large amounts of existing code are dependent on those ways, because the code was written to use that design. The ordering of dicts since 3.6 is an accidental consequence of an unrelated space optimization. In my view, the team erred by deciding in 3.7 to guarantee that ordering. I have concretely identified a further space optimization which is prevented as a result.
> Python in 2005, when everyone depended on the standard library, was a safer place than npm is today.
The flip side of dependency risk is security risk from lack of maintenance. For example, the standard library `json` module is a frozen-in-time old version of `simplejson` (it even remembers a useless version number). That project is still actively maintained (https://github.com/simplejson/simplejson) but none of those improvements - even if they fix security - will make it into Python except by parallel work by the core dev team. (Or accepting a patch; but that also requires either the maintainer or a third party to notice that a recent `simplejson` change is a security fix, figure out how to backport it to the much older version, and make a PR.)
There are other ways to solve the problem. For example, an organization similar to PyPA could publish a set of "core" libraries, versioned independently from Python but explicitly tested as part of the CPython release process. (That would also allow for fixing the problem that the standard library isn't namespaced - which is at the root of the problem whereby beginners e.g. put their toy lottery project in `random.py` and get an error from a circular import, or - I swear I'm not making this up - having a `token.py` in the current working directory breaks the interactive REPL help - see https://stackoverflow.com/a/75068706).
So, yes, it would be nice to see lockfiles that "depend only on a specific version of the Python Standard Library". Right now, that dependency goes undeclared, and the maintenance work is distributed among people who are also busy with developing the actual language.
Guido is the community. He's the one with the most legitimacy to represent it. To imply that Guido is something separate and divorced from the community is textbook subversion. I can't imagine any reason that others leaders in the Python community would have irreconcilable differences with Guido than if their interests were to corrupt the project.
Guido is part of the community, not the community. At least not anymore.
Go to pycon and try to talk to him. He doesn't want to talk to just anyone. And he's not great at accepting feedback.
We love him, of course. But there are reasons maybe that the community of users should have a strong voice in where python goes as well.
The walrus operator doesn’t seem like such a big deal now given these developments, and no doubt future developments of the same sort. The permanently offended aren’t going to just go until everything is in ruins and all the main contributors are gone.
Well, on the other hand, the only way out for a "Dictator" in the "BDFL" is to resign or be overthrown. He decided to resign, which is probably for the best. Otherwise a fork would have forced the decision, and been worse for the community as a whole.
Packaging and the 2.x to 3.x migration were both nightmares under his stewardship.
Keep in mind that the leaders of the PSF can be voted out, if so chosen by the community. And the community may have a different opinion on the election cycle and want to take python a different direction.
So BDFLs are immortal apparently. Maybe that can be a good motivation for people to contribute to open source.
Can you people just make your own projects and then ruin them in any way you want?
They can't. That's why they latch on like parasites to working projects.
Aaaah, once again community guidelines and codes of conduct reveal their nature as the thin edge of the wedge, the camel's nose in the tent.
Everything these people touch turns to shit. Look at the movies industry or gaming.
I wonder if there is a good list of these kinds of incidents going on in open source. It might be helpful in trying to figure out exactly what kind of clauses and verbiage, precisely, invite these kinds of takeover attempts like some kind of demon-summoning invocation.
Who are these people you're talking about?
Political activists disguised as software developers
One post. His posting rights haven't been withdrawn, it's one message in context which was elided out.
[edit: I am somewhat surprised people want to down-vote a factual statement, which in part aligns to the OP who changed the title of the post since it was being wrongly inferred his posting rights had gone, not a single post was being hidden. As the saying goes "you do you"]
I also don’t fully understand why some folks are worked up. We all have posts that are downvoted and removed even here on HN. If you don’t like the steering committee or whatever, just elect a new one.
Because this is not like any one of us having their comment removed on HN. This is like Paul Graham having their comment removed on HN.
A more drastic analogy, this is like getting kicked out of your house by your kids. Altough I see that this one is flawed and exaggarated
Why should Paul Graham's comments not be downvoted or removed from HN?
Because he founded ycombinator, he should be allowed at least a little more leniency.
Of course if he goes around directly and explicitly bashing all sorts of minorities or doxxes some other users or commits any other actual big nono, sure remove him.
This is not what happened. GvR was impolite at worst, and impolite your founder shall be allowed to be
Do you understand but just don't agree?
Can we help in increasing understanding on why people have certain opinions in this topic?
Or do you kinda know why and are expressing a kind of disagreement and disapproval of holding the opinions?
Yes, please help me understand why this is a big deal!
A committee that was chosen by a community decided to remove a post. It looks like the removal was well within their authority. If the community disagrees with the committee, they can move discussion to another venue, elect a new committee, and so on, no?
None of this adversely affects the performance or reliability of software written in python.
This doesn't directly affect the software as it currently stands.
It's mainly about the organisation. The people in charge have some a sequence of things that have increasingly alarmed people who care about the organisation of the project. More people are getting interested in what has happened with each step. This is one of the latest actions where even the key person who started Python has been impacted. This shows that the actions they were doing are important and worthy of attention as anyone who interacts within the organisation is within the reach of potential impact. No-one is untouchable. Outside though to the rest of us it's not directly impactful currently.
So then there is the impacts on wider things like software. As you say the community can just vote out the ones they dislike and vote in a new bunch. To me and many others, this sounds it should solve the situation. However I think some others see the problems as systemic, where the actions taken are a result of how the management organisation is structured and so the problems will occur again even if new people were in charge. If that's the case then more of a change might be demanded which could affect the software. (But in what ways is unclear)
On a HN scale, there's a wider sociological and cultural issue of how large open source software projects should be organised. And this is an example showing the problems of certain approaches especially as certain things were directly for reducing abuse and yet seem to be used in an abusive way. For many here on HN who are in various communities with similar structures, seeing what happens here is very important to them. There is a varying amount of personal investment in this story about the users own lives more than Python itself.
It looks like the removal was well within their authority
this is what i'd like to know more about. should they have this authority? especially to remove any posts in a non-transparent way? such a level of authority should be limited to removing obviously illegal or age-restricted content, but not the kind of message in question. and even then, it should require oversight from someone outside the committee, ideally people specifically trained for handling such messages.
Yup, and while I don't know the overlap between the committees, it seems like the CoC committee gave a recommendation to the Steering Committee, and the Steering Committee acted on the findings, and it wasn't just an instant ban hammer on Tim either.
Hiding Guido's comment I could see being controversial, but I also believe allowing relitigation or reinsertion of harmful drama in governance discussions as being disruptive. Hiding the comment wasn't punitive.
Also the project shouldn't go into freeze mode because a valuable contributor is doing time for a crime, such a practice would be super destructive to the project. It'd basically give filibuster power to any contributor of sufficient 'clout' to derail and delay any steering committee decisions indefinitely
Seems like someone's been reading How To Have AWS Announce A Fork Of Your Project In 21 Days on the toilet
Amazon wouldn't even officially fund python development internally (thankfully Chris Rose is a gem along with others so most never noticed), and they don't care about this kind of drama
Who's the un-person you're not allowed to name? I want to register and post his / her name and get banned myself. Perhaps, we should all do this.
Tim Peters, author of Timsort and the Zen of Python. He might be less of a public face of Python than GvR, but he was just as instrumental to its design all the way from the early years to its coming into the mainstream.
However, I don’t think reflexive actions like what you’re suggesting will sway anybody who’s not already convinced, or really help in any other way. Disruptive demonstrations can occasionally work IRL when they can serve to convey a concern to people who wouldn’t otherwise notice it, or to assure like-minded people that they’re not alone. Online forums, by contrast, are both lacking in passersby and plentiful in tools for suppressing disruptions.
Furthermore, I don’t think you can really outpolitick a politician on this low a level. Well-motivated and well-publicized forks could work. General apathy and nonparticipation could work. Other ways of voting with your feet could also work, if you can think of one. But you can’t argue (collaborate on converging to the truth) with an opponent who’s completely convinced of their own rightness and righteousness, only debate them (attempt to expose each other’s faults to an audience). Debating a politician won’t work, because they’ll crush you. It’s a large part of what being a good politician is, after all.
Why do you want to stick your opinion into something that you hadn't previously known about? What are you going to positively contribute to the discussion that will move things forward? How does that help?
Not OP, but stating that "ban for merely mentioning an un-person" is nuts looks like a positive contribution to me. Policies like this often stand because no one openly disagrees and no one openly disagrees because no one else does so you just assume everyone is OK with it. Until a child blurts out that the king is naked.
> Why do you want to stick your opinion into something that you hadn't previously known about? What are you going to positively contribute to the discussion that will move things forward? How does that help?
A prudent response, the revised ending of "The Emperor's New Clothes".
I want to shine more light on the nonsense.
why do steering committees for languages always devolve into this absurdity, usually by people with comparatively little technical capability.
Drama Driven Development is truly the paradigm of the last 5 years.
Why has no one pointed out that GvR posted a second time on the thread. That seems to suggest he is still actively engaged in the community?
Amazon Meta or Google should please create and maintain a corporate fork. The performance fixes could happen faster and would probably pay for themselves. No more problems with issues like this. Would provide some people with good jobs.
What performance fixes do you think were being slowed down by the community?
I'm pretty sure Amazon does at least - I thought that the Python version that runs in Lambda had a few features on top of CPython (mainly around relative imports but possibly other things too).
I prefer the Jimmy Wales version of authority. The project operates democratically, but Jimmy always retains the ultimate authority to act as a sovereign at the end of the day because he built it, has the reputation of the project to protect, and it's his legacy. The option to fork the project will always be there if the people want new leadership.
Guido did that for a long time, but I think he reached a point where he wanted to transition.
Again, I would prefer he retain an unused veto. Who knows, perhaps he's entirely fine with his comment being removed.
The benefits of a sovereign are that they limit the amount of privileges that can be extracted from an political system. Obviously monarchs have their downsides, but if people can just up and fork the project, those downsides are limited.
The downsides can be pretty high for the chosen monarch.
I obviously can't speak to the politics of the Python Foundation (my favorite language and would buy every single person in this governance discussion a beer), but my point is that these types of monarchs generally have more (Taleb-style) skin in the game than someone who shows up later. More to lose (everything they've built), and so I would generally trust their judgement to care more about the institution as a whole, than about exercising power (which is the entire reason they have effectively given up power in the first place).
a wannabe king is more than welcome to fork this project as it sits, right now, today. and they can be as non-democratic as they want with their own little fifedom.
> The project operates democratically
I have not paid attention in years, and with the acknowledgment that some of the contributors there were their own worst enemy and/or not without sin, but you should really poke around http://wikipediareview.com/ - to see just how untrue that often is.
(I'm talking confidential email lists, whose existence is not to be confirmed, IRC channels, brigading, and far worse).
Wow. If you needed proof that Guido isn't BDFL anymore, this is it.
GvR's first comment, mentioning (but not naming) the banned person, is now visible to me, at least.
I'm sorry but I have to reuse an old comment:
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
It's wonderful seeing this three days later after Guido himself has come in to say that this was nothing nefarious and more of an automation mishap. Yet here stands dozens of comments from people crying about how code of conduct is ruining the world and the PSF and SC should be dismantled.
As is often the case, there is usually more to the story and we would be better off learning what really happened instead of immediately jumping to conclusions and then blaming people based on those conclusions. Otherwise we look rather silly when it ends up that it was all just a mistake and we risk ruining a good thing by our rash judgements.
This is not one event in isolation, but rather a string of similar ones. And several folks did flag the post, did they not?
Article title: Should we consider Ranked Choice voting for SC elections?
Veritasium's latest video is on voting systems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qf7ws2DF-zk
So his original comment isn't on Internet Archive somewhere?
It only got snapshot once so far, and the comment is not showing up:
http://web.archive.org/web/20240829000336/https://discuss.py...
http://web.archive.org/web/20240829004501/https://discuss.py...
This is just nuts. Political correctness is gonna ruin great projects that should be guided with technical merits.
It's easier to run a Model UN game than develop a programming language.
This raises legitimate concerns for the long term viability of Python.
I think that Ranked Choice Voting might be helpful in an insular, knowledgable case like the PSF.
Its knowledge requirements of the voters are such that I would opposed it for general, political cases.
I'm going to be contrarian here and say, maybe it's the right choice. Bringing up already-litigated drama in an unrelated thread is not particularly constructive. If Guido thinks this person's opinions are relevant, he can send them and email and ask for them, right?
To some extent, the moderators are obligated to treat everyone equally. If they wouldn't let you or me relitagate past drama here, why should they let anyone? The core team should be setting the example for how other people should behave. If the core team doesn't agree with the values that they claim to agree to, and show this disdain by not enforcing their own rules, then why would they bother creating that governance structure in the first place? They are just being consistent with the processes that they agreed to and subjected themselves to. That's governance. Personally, I think it would be more alarming to the community if certain people didn't have to follow the rules.
As far as I can tell, there is no mention of not discussing the original decision in general. If there was, nobody seems to be following the rules as there are 8 billion Reddit threads on the topic. I knew nothing about this and had Names Named in about 3 seconds of searching. As a result, I don't think there is some sort of conspiracy taking place. Enough ink has been spilled on this issue; does it really need to be brought up again in a thread about voting systems?
Isn’t it good to see that no one is "above the law", even if they’re a benevolent dictator?
Sure if he was being hurtful, hateful, etc. But is comment hardly seems wrong in light of the community guidelines: https://discuss.python.org/guidelines
More seems it's just embarrassing to the committee so they banned it.
You could read Guide's message (assuming the first comment is quoting it accurately) as being sarcastic about Tim Peters' banning. The mods probably feel like this is undermining their authoritah, and dropped the banhammer.
It reads to me as kind of petty sniping that's unlikely to really contribute anything useful to the conversation. But not something that really seems worth hiding either...
I guess it could be considered to breach the Code of Conduct, disrespecting the decision to ban Tim?
Being respectful. We're respectful of others, their positions, their skills, their commitments, and their efforts.This seems to be the perfect pretense to justify any sort of banning an organized majority would want.
The question is always who enforces the law and if and how they choose to enforce it.
If the comment was the reference to a banned member, was the action actually inappropriate?
If the banning of the member alluded to was inappropriate, there is a time, place, and tact to address that. If the process does not allow for that, then you work towards changing the process. If the governing body doesn't allow for that, then why the heck would you make a comment that could derail a discussion regarding how that governing body is elected?
> If the comment was the reference to a banned member, was the action actually inappropriate?
Yes
> why the heck would you make a comment that could derail a discussion.
Banning the poster derailed the discussion even more. So much so, it made it to front page of HN.
I am not arguing they shouldn't have banned Guido because of who he is; I am arguing banning anyone should have a pretty high threshold, and when it happens it should be done with extreme transparency. Asking to wait for a member to join the discussion later about a relevant topic shouldn't come anywhere near that threshold.
I agree. But didn't he give up the Benevolent Dictator for Life moniker? Sounds like a King Lear situation... Since now we will divest us both of moderation authority, Interest of ban-hammering, cares of tweets,-- Which of you shall we say doth love us most? That we our highest privilege in the comments forum may extend Where nature doth with merit challenge. Tim, Our eldest-born, speak first."the law" is always subject to interpretation in a given context. The entire concept of case law is that "the law" has been interpreted in a certain way in a similar context before.
When two of the most important people to a project get banned, who is more likely incorrect? The bannors or the bannees?
Just because it is a well known quote, doesn't mean it's a good idea.
No one is above god's law (aka physics).
No one is above the _spirit_ of [man's] laws.