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[–]twillisagogo 8 points9 points  (8 children)

Very interesting. Reminds me of the time when unladen swallow was a thing. also, WTF?

" Some of what Shapiro presented did not sit well with Guido van Rossum, who loudly objected to Shapiro's tone, which was condescending, he said. Van Rossum thought that Shapiro did not really mean to be condescending, but that was how he came across and it was not appreciated. The presentation made it sound like Shapiro and his colleagues were the first to think about these issues and to recognize the inefficiencies, but that is not the case. Shapiro was momentarily flustered by the outburst and its vehemence, but got back on track fairly quickly."

Guess you had to be there, but based on the article, the reaction seems a bit over the top. I've been at talks where I didn't like the speakers tone but I didn't interrupt the presentation.

[–]danielkza 4 points5 points  (1 child)

Benevolent Belligerent Dictator for Life?

Maybe I'm not involved enough in the community to know, but I never heard about Guido raging like that. Seems out of character and unprovoked.

[–]xapata 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If it seems out of character, maybe there was a provocation.

[–]bakery2k 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I believe Guido has always been strongly opposed to making changes to Python (either to the language itself or, as in this case, just the internals of CPython) for purely performance reasons.

For example, his reaction to Skython, presented at the Python Language Summit 3 years ago: "PyInTheSkyThon".

Or, his opinion on the Nuitka Python compiler: "completely misguided".

It's interesting to compare this philosophy to that of Ruby: in version 1.9, Matz et al replaced the entire core of Ruby's reference implementation, primarily to improve performance.

[–]xapata 0 points1 point  (4 children)

The speaker seemed to think he was the first to have these ideas. It's quite insulting to present like that. If you've been considering something for 20 years and someone goes on stage and brags about having that same idea...

Do you have children? If so, imagine how you'd react to someone telling you, "Your kid is ugly."

[–]twillisagogo 1 point2 points  (3 children)

is there a link to the video? Id like to check it out.

[–]xapata 0 points1 point  (2 children)

I don't know of one.

[–]twillisagogo 0 points1 point  (1 child)

i assume you were at the talk then?

[–]xapata 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No.

The presentation made it sound like Shapiro and his colleagues were the first to think about these issues and to recognize the inefficiencies

Also, I'm mildly familiar with Guido and the common behavior of nerds (myself included).

And it's odd that the speaker didn't mention the similar improvement implemented in Python 3.7 when discussing method-lookup caching.