[Discuss] Guido van Rossum steps down

[invalid at pizzashack.org (Derek Martin)]

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 09:17:10PM -0400, Kent Borg wrote:
> I think there is turmoil ahead for Python.

Possibly, but I'm not convinced this is true.  I'm on the python list,
and it seems evident (and I think Guido himself said as much) that he
has little to do with the day-to-day decisions of the community
already.  He is--and will remain, for the time being--a core
developer, but I gather he's most influential when it comes to seeing
through PEPs.  Presumably the current other leaders in the community
will just have to fight out the contentious PEPs in his absence.  It
matters... but perhaps not as much as one might think.

> In hindsight, they made a mistake to break compatibility in 3.0, yet

I'm not sure if this was a mistake per se... though I will admit it
has discouraged me from adopting a newer Python.  But then I don't
program in Python all that much these days, so I don't matter (and
likely didn't anyway!) but lots of folks would argue the changes were
for the better, ultimately.

> didn't take the opportunity to fix the global interpreter lock that
> keeps Python from doing multithreading very well.

This is true, and I've lamented this myself on a handful of occasions.
Although if you're desperate, there are workarounds (like writing an
extension in C), and of course, not every program can really benefit
from concurrency.  For many of the things that Python can do, this
isn't an issue.  For myself, when I've *really* needed concurrency I
just wrote the solution in C(++) instead.  I'm sure you're aware the
reason it hasn't been fixed is because no one has come up with a
solution that does not cause non-threaded programs to take a
significant performance hit.  Although, in light of the Intel Meltdown
patches... ;-)

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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