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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
that's always the same thing that people trip over when they trip.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
And we could not think of a backwards compatible way of resolving those issues.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
But it's still an option to not resolve the issues, right?
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
And so yes, for a long time, we had sort of resigned ourselves to, well, okay, the language
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
is not going to be perfect in this way and that way and that way.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
And we sort of, certain of these, I mean, there are still plenty of things where you
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
can say, well, that particular detail is better in Java or in R or in Visual Basic or whatever.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
And we're okay with that because, well, we can't easily change it.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
It's not too bad.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
We can do a little bit with user education or we can have a static analyzer or warnings
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
in the parse or something.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
But there were things where we thought, well, these are really problems that are not going
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
away.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
They are getting worse in the future.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
We should do something about that.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
But ultimately there is a decision to be made, right?
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
So was that the toughest decision in the history of Python you had to make as the benevolent
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
dictator for life?
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
Or if not, what are there, maybe even on the smaller scale, what was the decision where
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
you were really torn up about?
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
Well, the toughest decision was probably to resign.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
All right, let's go there.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
Hold on a second then.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
Let me just, because in the interest of time too, because I have a few cool questions for
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
you and let's touch a really important one because it was quite dramatic and beautiful
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
in certain kinds of ways.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
In July this year, three months ago, you wrote, now that PEP 572 is done, I don't ever want
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
to have to fight so hard for a PEP and find that so many people despise my decisions.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
I would like to remove myself entirely from the decision process.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
I'll still be there for a while as an ordinary core developer and I'll still be available
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
to mentor people, possibly more available.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
But I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL, benevolent dictator
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
for life.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
And you all will be on your own.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
First of all, it's almost Shakespearean.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
I'm not going to appoint a successor.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
So what are you all going to do?
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
Create a democracy, anarchy, a dictatorship, a federation?
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
So that was a very dramatic and beautiful set of statements.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
It's almost, it's open ended nature called the community to create a future for Python.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
It's just kind of a beautiful aspect to it.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
So what, and dramatic, you know, what was making that decision like?
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
What was on your heart, on your mind, stepping back now a few months later?
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
I'm glad you liked the writing because it was actually written pretty quickly.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
It was literally something like after months and months of going around in circles, I had
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
finally approved PEP572, which I had a big hand in its design, although I didn't initiate
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
it originally.
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I sort of gave it a bunch of nudges in a direction that would be better for the language.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
So sorry, just to ask, is async IO, that's the one or no?
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PEP572 was actually a small feature, which is assignment expressions.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
That had been, there was just a lot of debate where a lot of people claimed that they knew
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
what was Pythonic and what was not Pythonic, and they knew that this was going to destroy
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
the language.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
This was like a violation of Python's most fundamental design philosophy, and I thought
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
that was all bullshit because I was in favor of it, and I would think I know something
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
about Python's design philosophy.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
So I was really tired and also stressed of that thing, and literally after sort of announcing
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
I was going to accept it, a certain Wednesday evening I had finally sent the email, it's
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
accepted.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
I can just go implement it.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
So I went to bed feeling really relieved, that's behind me.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
And I wake up Thursday morning, 7 a.m., and I think, well, that was the last one that's
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
going to be such a terrible debate, and that's the last time that I let myself be so stressed
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
out about a pep decision.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
I should just resign.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
I've been sort of thinking about retirement for half a decade, I've been joking and sort
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
of mentioning retirement, sort of telling the community at some point in the future
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
I'm going to retire, don't take that FL part of my title too literally.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
And I thought, okay, this is it.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
I'm done, I had the day off, I wanted to have a good time with my wife, we were going to
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
a little beach town nearby, and in I think maybe 15, 20 minutes I wrote that thing that
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
you just called Shakespearean.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
The funny thing is I didn't even realize what a monumental decision it was, because
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
five minutes later I read that link to my message back on Twitter, where people were
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
already discussing on Twitter, Guido resigned as the BDFL.
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And I had posted it on an internal forum that I thought was only read by core developers,
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
so I thought I would at least have one day before the news would sort of get out.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
The on your own aspects had also an element of quite, it was quite a powerful element
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
of the uncertainty that lies ahead, but can you also just briefly talk about, for example
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
I play guitar as a hobby for fun, and whenever I play people are super positive, super friendly,
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
they're like, this is awesome, this is great.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
But sometimes I enter as an outside observer, I enter the programming community and there
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
seems to sometimes be camps on whatever the topic, and the two camps, the two or plus
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
camps, are often pretty harsh at criticizing the opposing camps.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
As an onlooker, I may be totally wrong on this, but what do you think of this?
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
Yeah, holy wars are sort of a favorite activity in the programming community.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
And what is the psychology behind that?
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
Is that okay for a healthy community to have?
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
Is that a productive force ultimately for the evolution of a language?
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
Well, if everybody is patting each other on the back and never telling the truth, it would
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
not be a good thing.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
I think there is a middle ground where sort of being nasty to each other is not okay,
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
but there is a middle ground where there is healthy ongoing criticism and feedback that
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
is very productive.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
And you mean at every level you see that.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
I mean, someone proposes to fix a very small issue in a code base, chances are that some
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
reviewer will sort of respond by saying, well, actually, you can do it better the other way.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
When it comes to deciding on the future of the Python core developer community, we now
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
have, I think, five or six competing proposals for a constitution.
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Guido van Rossum: Python | Lex Fridman Podcast #6
So that future, do you have a fear of that future, do you have a hope for that future?
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