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Comment by antman | Hacker News Reader

People complain on external corporate capture e.g. Microsoft’s embrace, extend, extinguish but I see a more common pattern of introducing internal corporate complexity driving socially powered projects to oblivion. Drupal’s extension system a few years back, Firefox addon ecosystem destruction, Python features after 3.8 and many others.

People that contribute are not infinite and those initial more active contributors get demoralized supporting work over a moving foundation.

Why not put up an effort on speeding things up, removing the GIL. Important and stale issues of the language that users really care about. F strings where good tho. That’s it. Async syntax? Less good. This pattern matching thing? Have fun debugging this.

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>Firefox addon ecosystem destruction

Firefox suffered greatly in marketshare because they didn't pull the plug soon enough but rather gained a reputation for slowness and bugginess. Doing nothing isn't a viable strategy when you have competitors (ie: Chrome) who are doing something.

> Firefox addon ecosystem destruction

I _love_ that I can install an extension without restarting, and as much as I sympathize with the pet projects that got dumped, I think it would have been a huge mistake to hold that up just to keep dead extensions in zombie mode rather than grave mode.

>I _love_ that I can install an extension without restarting

Why? How many times do you install extensions that restarting the browser to see them would be a concern?

A lot of us use url/cookie/etc cleaners and restarting the browser forces us to log back in to sites that we'd rather not want to during the current browser session. OR have the browser set to just delete everything at close.

1) if you want to keep the session, why do you use a session cleaner? 2) how hoften do you install new extensions? Is this really a problem?

I leave browsers open for days/weeks. I save anything I think I'll need to bookmarks or pocket. I like having it wiped when I close it. Which does force me to log back in to email/reddit/HN/etc. I have encrypted applescripts for that though so it's not too annoying.

So basically: https://xkcd.com/1172/

> Why not put up an effort on speeding things up, removing the GIL.

You are making it look like there is nobody working on those things but there is actually multiple core devs trying to making Python faster.

I always found it funny that there active efforts to speed up the language by adding more of the dreaded GILs to the runtime!

https://bugs.python.org/issue40512

> Python features after 3.8 and many others.

Really, after 3.8? I thought 3.5 was a golden era?

> Why not put up an effort on speeding things up, removing the GIL.

That's exactly what requires corporate backing (removing is easy, fixing all the breakage it causes takes a lot of time and effort).

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