Hacker News Reader

Comment by comesee | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com