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Comment by sonicrocketman | Hacker News Reader

From what I see, the community keeps changing its mind every few years. We need to pick a multitasking method and really embrace it. If we want to keep the GIL, then we need to go whole hog on some other approach.

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A community which changes its mind every few years is a community which does not have effective leadership. Python's leadership is ineffective because 3.x has erased its credibility. You have maximum one opportunity to change a language in mid course. That opportunity has already been used (wasted?) in the case of Python, and while it could have addressed the elephant in the room, multicore, it did not. Instead it indulged the wishes of its powers that be to tinker on the edges to make Python more "serious", in the process adding nothing that anybody needed, while reducing simplicity and accessibility, and, criminal sin, no backward compatibility with no corresponding forward killer feature.

Now, nothing less than a wholesale change of the leadership can right the listing ship.

> Now, nothing less than a wholesale change of the leadership can right the listing ship.

I'd suggest you to go to python-dev and post a concrete (and realistic!) proposal on how to improve whatever you think is broken.

Suggesting to change the leadership isn't really productive.

Leadership change is the fundamental basis of our societies, from the central tenets of democracy, to the structure of our economies where positions of responsibility require competence, at the risk of rapid replacement. It is, on the contrary, very productive to make a case in a public forum (this one) for an ineffective leadership to be changed, if it will help to alter the course of an endeavour which has lost its way, an endeavour, by the way, on which millions of programmers' livelihoods depend.

With due and high respect for the people who work hard on Python, I am happy to contribute, but I am not happy serving the leadership of the project as it currently stands. Python 3.x is a net value-destroying proposition, but the current leadership has spent so much energy exhorting the community to move, without success, that it has no choice now than to stand down.

I suspect you don't really know what you are talking about...

What is the point of this comment? How am I incorrect? My points are:

1) Python 2.7 is still, 6 years later, much more popular than Python 3.x.

2) Python 3.x now has 5 versions, none of which has features which are strong enough to cause migration. Specifically, async is not as easy as the competition, type annotations are an itellectual indulgence if they don't improve performance, and ease of use, a central pillar of the language's attractiveness to newcomers, is being eroded with unnecessary moves towards "seriousness".

3) It was a mistake by the Python authorities to break compatibilty without bringing substantial new features. Breaking compatibility allows revolutionary features. Instead we have breaking of compatibility with only incremental improvement.

4) Because the leadership refuses to acknowledge 1-3, its credibility is now questionable. It is an important related issue that people who point out these problems, as I do, face a strong barrage of criticism, with suspicions of orchestration.

5) With due respect for and gratitude to the inventors and contributors, the time for change has come. For Python to flourish, new leadership is needed.

I am happy to debate my strong opinions, but to suggest out of the blue that I don't know what I'm talking about is not interesting. I have been using Python for a decade. I know it very well. You may know it better, in which case I would like to hear your considered opinions on my points. The context, for avoidance of doubt, is my love of Python, and my strong desire for it to continue to do well.

i personally don't care too much about how python 2 is still more popular than python 3. it's like saying java 1.5 is more popular than java 8. it just doesn't matter to people who use python 3. after working on a python 3 code base for almost 2 years now i wouldn't go back to python 2 if they paid me for it and there's one reason for that: exception handling. it's something that's just broken in python 2. it's a huge change and your 3) is invalid because of that (and unicode, but you probably don't care if you don't consider this a worthwile change.) your 4) thus doesn't follow. re your point 5), python's current leadership should be commended for creating a language so good that people have no reason to switch from. python 3 is even better, so just start using it for new projects.

FWIW nothing stops you from forking the project and being a leader of it. Go ahead, show the better way.

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