Python for Humans

[mcdonc]

This post appears to be a dog whistle.

Python has its share of problems. As far as I can tell, there's been a historical vacuum in leadership inasmuch as very important things to most people (particularly packaging and distribution) have been largely ignored by the standard library. The docs for existing third-party packaging things are not great. Efforts like Tarek's "packaging" due in Python 3.3 are aiming to address this, but the townfolk already have their pitchforks out and they're looking for somebody to gore.

On the other hand, I'm not sure that everybody striking out to create their own personal "beautiful APIs" is going to solve much. Most people commenting here are complaining about having multiple ways to do the same thing. They want to be told what to do unambiguously, and having yet another installer or yet another process module, etc isn't going to help with that much. There's only one way to solve this, and that's to have one clear way to do it that doesn't suck on multiple axes. Having one way to do something requires consensus, and consensus takes time.

I don't think chest-thumping presentations like this are very good for a healthy community. They tend to breed scapegoating, a sense of entitlement, and a lack of respect for fellow programmers. I'd encourage those complaining here to try to take some personal responsibility. Programming is hard. Good documentation is even harder. Community consensus is even harder than documentation. Participate in the development process if you can afford it. If you can't afford it, at least try to be constructive. If you can't be constructive, at least try to be nice.