Progress on the Gilectomy

Posted Jun 4, 2017 3:48 UTC (Sun) by njs (subscriber, #40338)
In reply to: Progress on the Gilectomy by pboddie
Parent article: Progress on the Gilectomy

Sorry, I was trying to give some perspective on why the PSF currently works the way it does and which direction it's currently heading. I'm not really sure what point you're trying to make now; there seem to be a lot of insinuations that someone is doing something wrong and that bad things will happen if they don't shape up, but I can't quite tell what you think is wrong or what should be done instead. All I can say is that from where I sit, it looks like people doing their best to chip away at some hard problems, and that things are getting slowly better over time.

Progress on the Gilectomy

Posted Jun 4, 2017 14:20 UTC (Sun) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link] (2 responses)

I was going to respond to this, but given that I then found myself repeating what I had already written, and given that I am apparently just sharing "insinuations", I doubt that there is any productive dialogue to be had.

Progress on the Gilectomy

Posted Jun 4, 2017 23:35 UTC (Sun) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link] (1 responses)

I'm referring to comments like 'grants take up a rather small proportion of the PSF's spending', 'core developers being hired to "work on Python" actually not really spending their work time, or very much of it, "on Python"', 'culture of everything having to be a zero-sum game', etc. - none of this matches my experience at all. For example, the PSF spends basically all of its discretionary money on grants, and last I heard they had more money than proposals, so it's hard to blame them if the things you want to be funded aren't being funded. Major projects like static typing and the pypi rewrite are currently being supported by corporations paying employees to work on them. Etc.

Progress on the Gilectomy

Posted Jun 5, 2017 14:16 UTC (Mon) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link]

PSF grants funding Python development in 2016 amounted to 6% of the total expenditure.

I rely on public knowledge to estimate how much time core developers spend working on, not working with, Python in their day jobs. And even if some people are doing so, other evidence of people's employment translating to significant progress on critical implementation issues (see the article for an example) is rather thin on the ground. (Making other people's lives harder is, apparently, a different matter.)

But these are merely "insinuations", apparently. That's why other people at those corporations consider going their own way instead. Nothing to see here, I guess.

(And as for the zero-sum game culture, I guess you've never encountered anyone who, upon being told that you're working on something similar to them and want to share perspectives, flat out asked you why you don't just work on their project instead. Start with the passive aggression towards Python 2 at the very top and then work your way down through all the people belittling each other's projects. There's plenty to see if you want to.)