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Python Language Founder Steps Down (zdnet.com)
After almost 30 years of overseeing the development of the world's most popular language, Python, its founder and "Benevolent Dictator For Life" (BDFL), Guido van Rossum, has decided to remove himself entirely from the decision process. From a report: Van Rossum isn't leaving Python entirely. He said, "I'll still be there for a while as an ordinary core dev, and I'll still be available to mentor people -- possibly more available." It's clear from van Rossum's note he's sick and tired of running the organization. He wrote, "I don't ever want to have to fight so hard for a PEP (Python Enhancement Proposals) [PEP 572 Assignment Expressions] and find that so many people despise my decisions." In addition, van Rossum hints he's not been well. "I'm not getting younger... (I'll spare you the list of medical issues.)" So, "I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL, and you all will be on your own." From the email: I am not going to appoint a successor. So what are you all going to do? Create a democracy? Anarchy? A dictatorship? A federation? I'm not worried about the day to day decisions in the issue tracker or on GitHub. Very rarely I get asked for an opinion, and usually it's not actually important. So this can just be dealt with as it has always been. At Slashdot, we had the privilege of interviewing Guido van Rossum, a Computer History Museum honoree, in 2013.
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I've been using Python since the mid 2000's, and the evolution of its design has been worrying. The 2-to-3 transition is an obvious, glaring example.
But there has also been a steady accretion of additional syntax and language-level features, leading me to think the project is taking a C++-like attitude of never saying "no" to any proposal, just throw the next one on top of the pile. Type annotations, decorators... and now this recent PEP, which changes the most basic syntactic distinction in the language (expressions vs. statements).
Coherence and conceptual integrity are important, and each one of these changes chips away at the essence of the language and adds complication. Some amount of change is healthy, but it has to be managed carefully by language designers who are willing to say "no" and say it often. Erlang, Lua, and Go come to mind as well-managed languages that haven't lost sight of their original design.
I don't know if Python is better off without Guido, but from a language design point of view, I don't think he's done an especially great job.
You can tell a lot of thought was put into Python, but almost exactly none of that thought came from anyone who knew more than a couple of programming languages. Python reimplements many of the mistakes of the past, and not very well.
IT would indeed be poorer without Python. There's a whole cottage industry in getting rich from fixing broken Python code.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
And the mandatory whitespace is just idiotic, sorry but it is.
Python just implements it badly. Nobody complains about mandatory whitespace in Haskell, partly because it doesn't have Python's rough edges, and partly because it isn't strictly mandatory.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});