Guido blames social media for his decision to abandon the supervision of Python

As for the claim of "questioning [his] authority", isn't that a given? With or without social media. That's pretty much human nature. It's up to you to establish the tone and medium of how people interact with you. Linus, for example, is pretty much strictly email and most things go through one of the "inner circle" who are largely responsible for areas like networking. As brash as he can be, you pretty much know what to expect and you have delegation.

Honestly, I wonder how much of this goes back to GvR's handling of Python 3. This should go down as something to be studied for years on how not to do a breaking change. IIRC Python 3 was released in 2008. Here we are in 2019 with no end in sight for Python 2.7.

My favourite Python 3ism was the removal of the s and u string literal prefixes. In Python 2.0+, u'this is a string' was a Unicode literal prefix. It was removed in 3.0 for reasons that are beyond me (I know Unicode became the default for string literals) but then added back in 3.3 for backwards compatibility. Why remove it in the first place? It makes no sense. But this just went to the perception that the Python powers-that-be were removed from reality in their hubris.

Anyway, GvR... one can't help but respect his stewardship and contribution to Python. Please make no mistake about that. The weird thing about human nature is in situations like this, if the peanut gallery senses they're getting to you it only encourages them. Sad but true.

It's not easy to take all the hate and ill-will day in day out. It's not even easy to ignore it, much less to deal with it.

I respect Guido's decision even though I was quite sad to see him step down. It's not difficult to see that, with Pythons growing popularity, things would probably have become even worse for him in the future.

There was a really good Keynote by Brett Cannon last year at PyCon about how hard, emotionally, maintaining OSS is: https://youtu.be/tzFWz5fiVKU?t=3259 -- Unfortunately the official post is buried after 50 minutes of lightning talks. He gets very emotional on stage. I was sitting with him before he gave this talk, it was a very hard talk for him to give, and so very important.

My own story like this: I took over maintenance of a module that had been abandoned, but after the better part of a decade I ran into a time in my life where I have little time for it. It had been languishing, but someone finally offered to help out on the maintenance. Great! I added them to the github project, they started triaging issues, and within a day this guy started spitting vitriol at the new maintainer.

I called this guy out, but he doubled down. I just locked the issue and moved on with my life. But this guy tracked me down and sent me an e-mail to my personal e-mail full of expletives. Followed quickly by an apology:

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to send that e-mail from my work e-mail address, please don't get me fired."

Literally: No apology for being a jerk, just begging me not to share that exchange with their employer. All of the github comments he had made were removed or severely edited.

And... That person who offered to maintain that module? That was the last time they touched it.

The breaking point was PEP 572 (ie :=) which was quite controversial. The lesson here: One shouldn't attempt to reverse 25-year old design decisions, not even GvR. Python is too big now.

There was a compromise (and more congruent) alternative, reuse of the "as" keyword, that was thrown out immediately, and proponents rammed 572 thru despite significant objection. That's when things got ugly. Personally I disagreed with that decision, and tried to support the compromise design.

In the end, didn't think 572 was the end of the world (will be occasionally useful, if ugly), and tried to stay polite, but sadly many didn't. Then he accepted 572 and stepped down, as if one last poke in the eye, unfortunately.

So I think (and hope) the effect of these changes will be that Guido will make more or less the same decisions as before, but both be under less stress when doing so (because he doesn't have to be the final decision maker), and no longer have to be concerned about people questioning the source of his authority.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwj9...

Citation - Yesterday at Pycon during the Steering Council meeting he stated that he tendered his BDFL resignation the morning after approving that PEP

Maybe this is something you have to get used to.

Edit: I meant I don't know what he did as a bdfl day to day.

Quote from Guido:

If you say "our project is open, anybody can come and join us, anybody can contribute", you are really underestimating the issues. Because it is not just joining the project that's the problem, it is staying in the project.

Which means you have to feel comfortable exchanging emails and code reviews and what-all with people that you don't know personally but you communicate frequently online.

And that sort of communication requires that everybody has respect for each other, and that respect is often missing because of unconscious biases, where guys and sometimes even women, who believe that they have no bias, don't realize that there are small differences in communication styles between men and women, (sometimes they are large differences) that just make it harder for women to join a particular community.

Because it's not just about writing the code, you have to sort of stand up for your code, defend your code, and there is a certain male attitude there that is endemic in many projects, where a woman for example would just not feel comfortable sort of claiming that she is right, that she has the correct insight to decide or to choose a solution, while a guy who knows less than that woman might honestly believe more in their own being right, and so they present a much more confident image. And so they have a much easier time even when they are not all that competent. As long as they present confidence they might get their inferior solution adopted.

A woman will more likely feel that she has to have a perfect solution and a perfect understanding of the issues, why it is a perfect solution, before she will even submit a patch. I am doing a fair amount of mentoring of women specifically, and I found that sometimes women I am mentoring will ask for my approval on every step of the way. They will say "I want to file an issue on the bug tracker but I'm afraid of the negative backlash when I put the issue in, can I tell you what I want to write the issue about?" That is charming, but and I always tell them "just put it in the tracker already! your head is not going to be bitten off, you will got honest feedback, and whether the feedback is 'that is a good idea' or 'that is a bad idea' it will be fine". But I'm sure a guy of the same skill level would not hesitate to just put the issue in the tracker. It is a bit of an attitude and mentality difference which makes it much harder for competent women to get started and stay afloat in this community where the male attitude is the default attitude. Because if someone presents that uncertainty, they are much more likely to get ignored or rejected.

Social media is a red herring here; this sort of thing has happened on all forms of social media since the dawn of computing. It used to be on mailing lists and Usenet. Now it's primarily on Twitter.

After 30 years of leading a project, anyone is going to get worn down.