"A lot of people remarked that in my post on Tail Recursion Elimination I confused tail self-recursion with other tail calls, which proper Tail Call Optimization (TCO) also eliminates. I now feel more educated: tail calls are not just about loops"
http://neopythonic.blogspot.com/2009/04/final-words-on-tail-...
What exactly did your reply contribute, aside from calling me a "trolling asshole"?
Seems like quite a normal thing to me (it's called "learning"), so what's the big deal here?
Is Guido not allowed to make mistakes?
As I understood the discussion there is no definite "right" or "wrong" on the issue anyways - it's merely one of the many tradeoffs. Quite possibly one where he wasn't fully aware of all details and implications. But heck, if you need to argue then how about arguing for or against a particular way to do TCO in python instead of going ad hominem against the guy who built the entire playground that you're building your little sandcastles in?
Python has done very well in its history and I personally like it. However, Guido made his final decision literally days after learning the distinction. This means before that any decisions he made in this area were based on shaky information. Furthermore, he was initially informed by comments on his blog, not his own research. I'm worried what this means for future decisions in Python if Guido doesn't research something on his own before making decisions on it. I understand that he's busy, but working of Python is part of that and surely research should be included :).
Here's the thing: Your first post was unfounded and uninformed personal attack on someone you don't know. That's reddit style trolling, and says a lot more about what kind of person you are than it says about the person you're attacking. Hacker news would be better place without that.