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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Whatever apology GvR is owed, it's none of my business. The post-BDFL continuity plan is super relevant to me, but I can say with some confidence that GvR does not need me as a witness to whatever psychological remediation he may or may not need for the assignment expression debacle. It's not my place to psychoanalyze him, and he rather clearly didn't ask me to.

So again: why, as a professional who interacts with the Python ecosystem, am I interested in anything more than what is already happening on the thread?

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Are you not interested in what caused the leader of a community to step down? Do you not think that that information would be helpful in sustaining the community? This event is not business as usual, it should be considered with great care.

Not really? I'm not suggesting that great care shouldn't be taken; I'm suggesting that there's no evidence that it hasn't, and that neither you nor me are particularly important players in the story of what is happening, and that nobody owes us an explanation. Certainly, a concerted effort to prevent GvR from stepping down as BDFL seems silly.

I'm not implying an effort to prevent GvR from stepping down, but I don't think the lack of public consideration among core devs on why this happened is healthy either.

I don't see it as mystery as why it happened. Perhaps you are thinking there was some specific trigger for his stepping down. I don't think so. When the language becomes as popular as Python has, the head of the project is going to become a target for a lot of unwanted attention. The "assignment expression" PEP was a good example of that but not the sole cause.

Even if infuriating jerks are 0.1% of the population, when your language has hundreds of thousands of users, you are going to deal with a lot of jerks. Frankly, I'm surprised he lasted as long as he did without going mad or something. I would not wish for any of my friends to be subjected to that kind of attention.

We were very lucky to have him leading the project for so long. Python will survive without a BDFL and I hope he enjoys the vacation.

I'm not exactly implying that it's a mystery. Mystery or not it I think it warrants some public consideration. If the reason indeed was 0.1% jerks, that should be confirmed and addressed in writing.

I strongly agree with you, but i think a lot of programmers are so rational that they simply process the information and dont feel anything about it.

It's kind of cold to me, but I know this field is not filled with the emotional types...

If a parent tells their 25 year old child that they’re done with it and sick and tired of the job, I think the child should at least look inside themselves and assess whether anything they did that prompted that should be changed.

If the relationship between GvR and the Python project was some completely different relationship (parent-child, facehugger-host, butterfly-cyclone, etc) then maybe there should be some completely different response. But it's not.

> I'm not suggesting that great care shouldn't be taken; I'm suggesting that there's no evidence that it hasn't, and that neither you nor me are particularly important players in the story of what is happening, and that nobody owes us an explanation.

Completely tangential, but the density of negatives in that sentence was nothing short of majestic.

Why you should care: it's relevant to the post-BDFL continuity plan, because 1) the stressors that pushed GvR out will also act upon the new decisionmakers, 2) those stressors can be reduced, and 3) change-of-control is innately risky and we should be extra-worried (at this moment) about existing, important stressors.

I care that those concerns are being addressed. I do not care whether they're addressed in public in a way designed to mollify any particularized concerns I might have, because I am not a member of the Python core team, and they don't owe me that.

I mean, nobody on the py-committers threads owes you anything. But OP was observing an apparent gap in their thinking -- and indirectly, stating there is a toxic element of culture that destroys leadership morale, which nobody is (publicly) commenting on.

I think you'd say the same, if you agreed that culture was a solvable contributor to GvR's exit (even if you, like me, knew he was leaving for market reasons eventually). By analogy, if 'dang said "I'm leaving yall, this sucks, elect a replacement" and we were like "cool who's it gonna be". That would be an error, and I think you would be at the top of the comment page saying "Also, let's all make some changes so that the next 'dang doesn't have a miserable life."

Avoiding recurrance.

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