Tim Peters – Dispelling Information Asymmetry

For those who don't know the name, Tim Peters is the author of "The Zen of Python". He is the one who uniquely captured was Python is all about with this inspirational little poem:

    The Zen of Python, by Tim Peters

    Beautiful is better than ugly.
    Explicit is better than implicit.
    Simple is better than complex.
    Complex is better than complicated.
    Flat is better than nested.
    Sparse is better than dense.
    Readability counts.
    Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
    Although practicality beats purity.
    Errors should never pass silently.
    Unless explicitly silenced.
    In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
    There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
    Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.
    Now is better than never.
    Although never is often better than *right* now.
    If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
    If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
    Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!

Also, he is the author of the famous TimSort algorithm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timsort

Some previous related discussions on this:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41212788 ["The Shameful Defenestration of Tim" by Chris McDonough]

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41515766 ["A Mess in the Python Community", lwn.net]

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41385546 ["A post by Guido van Rossum removed for violating Python community guidelines"]

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41314393 ["Calling for a Vote of No Confidence in the Python Steering Council"]

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41234180 ["Core Python developer suspended for three months"]

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41187470 ["Three month suspension for Python core developer"]

Tim is very short on the topic of actual accusations but someone else does a good job discussing them one by one:

https://chrismcdonough.substack.com/p/the-shameful-defenestr...

And this one struck me:

> > "Dismissing unacceptable behavior of others as a “neurodivergent” trait"

> In the context of the bylayws change discussions, Tim detailed his relationship with a prickly core developer who was maniacal about a particular bit of stdlib code, whom he considered neurodivergent, and lamented that that person had been removed, because their code was top-notch. He then started a thread questioning if Python was accepting of such people. The accusation is accurate, except in the characterization of "unacceptable" perhaps. The characterizations certainly were not unacceptable to me.

Apart from my personal feelings about this, which are obviously 100% aligned with Toms, I find this particular case a bit bizarre. Where I work for, we have neurodiversity training, celebrate the neurodiversity day, and in general respect the topic a lot, making it clear that neurodiverse people actually belong here. So the actions of these folks seem at odd with something I consider the modern norm, that's really weird.

There have been other bans of dubious merit, but this one hit a nerve because in many ways Tim Peters gave the Python core development team its soul.

He had playful and witty style backed by deep technical acumen. His little nudges provided the team with quiet leadership and direction over a quarter century.

One core developer (the mathematician) recently quit over this and said, "he was the best of us".

I think one of the hardest problems in community moderation is finding good moderators.

A moderator's job description involves outlining fault in other people's words and occasionally punishing them for it. That sort of thing is tedious to most people, but thrilling to some very emotionally unhealthy ones. Few people who want the job can be trusted with the power.

I fear the python steering council has been lost to people who don't have the maturity to talk through problems in a healthy way.

Another writeup:

The Shameful Defenestration of Tim

https://chrismcdonough.substack.com/p/the-shameful-defenestr...

The way that Tim was treated was disgraceful. Definitely made me less likely to participate in the Python forums.

Edit - I should clarify that my main concern was the way that all of his alleged offences were collectively summarised into one long list of offences, making them all seem worse collectively. But as Chris McDonough explained in his post, each "offence" was either trivial in nature, or completely taken out of context and made to sound much worse than what it was.

At least for now, there's more content available from https://tim-one.github.io/psf/ . I checked the repository - it's only a couple of days old, so a new effort. A few of the commits are by David Mertz, too, which is interesting. My own articles are linked, too, which of course I appreciate. (I still have more to write on the topic, but I've already fallen too far behind in writing things which aren't about the PSF.)

If the Python Software Foundation is going to ban experienced CPython core developers, it's unfortunate, but I wish those driven out went straight to work on PyPy instead. Perhaps this way it could receive the extra impulse necessary to take off among the masses. It's a seriously underrated project.

The woke / sjw disease really ruins everything.

Ok I wrote a long thing but answered all my questions myself. There's a whole chorus of people backing Mr. Peters up in these comments, so I thought it would be interesting to share the other side from Ms. Wages, the current Python Czar/Queen/Big Boss. The defenses from her colleagues in the actual ban thread on the specifics of the case are... not flattering, I'd say.

BTW, is it weird to anyone else that Microsoft was allowed to hire the person who runs Python as a "Python Community Advocate" only a month after they took office...? Seems like something that the web working groups would cry foul over; maybe Python isn't to that point yet, b/c there hasn't been a Python browser war? Anyway;

  Membership is by far, to me, the most important work group among the bunch. From this past year, I've seen a disconnect between the community having valid concerns and getting them across to the "powers that be" to have them enacted. From the way I hear people talk about the PSF board, it feels like people see the board as a group of people far away from the membership that may not understand what everyone else wants in their community-driven organization. For what it's worth, these are common growing pains of any organization going from medium to large, or small to medium (depending on your vantage the PSF could be either; but regardless is that we are growing along with the language).

  I can say confidently that is not the case that we are far away from the desires of the membership. We are boots on the ground organizers who love the community and challenge our own beliefs constantly in our meetings. Clearly, we're not sharing the effort we take to learn about our membership and how much we debate in our meetings to reach our goal of voting consensus in our board resolutions; a goal we reach more often than not.

  Without a solid conversation with our membership, we are reliant upon the urgency and rhetoric to get across a point, which leaves a lot to be desired to say the least. And the membership is left inferring our opinions from a one-line resolution (although our communications team on staff are helping with this). In points where the membership on opposite sides would otherwise agree, we lose the plot with hyperbole, metaphors and analogies. The last thing I will do is tone police, period. The goal is to make it easier to communicate between the board, staff and membership so we don't feel the need to use strong rhetoric. I have faith that if other methods to communicate are felt to be abundantly available and effective, they will be employed before we get to the harsh and derisive communications. 

https://dawnwages.info/bajoran-engineer/2024/08/09/2024-pyth...

:shrug: That clearly reads as good faith and well reasoned to me, so I have faith it'll all get sorted -- I'm sure their office hours on the 8th this month will be quite lively! Though I'm not sure they'll ever get Mr. Peters back fully. Some of these moderating decisions have been ridiculous, namely banning someone for life for "questioning moderating decisions" and banning this fella for 3 months (?) when "there was no singular incident or sentence that comprised an offense" (??), but the post above gives me hope for a course correct there, and hope for the org in general.

TIL they hand out $600K+ annually for Python development, that's incredible! Maybe Microsoft should kick in a mil or two...

ETA: this is the fabled code of conduct, which I think is objectively reasonable. That is, of course, until you get to the last forbidden behavior:

  Other conduct that is inappropriate for a professional audience including people of many different backgrounds

https://policies.python.org/python.org/code-of-conduct/ I appreciate the attempt to cover their bases, but in an org that is seemingly so proud of their democratic processes, that's a classic opening for judicial overreach.