IMO, "please be quiet" is not a productive response to criticisms coming from folks whom have actually already ported many lines of code and whom are now maintaining cross-compatible code bases.
I realize that's not what you mean to say, but I'm not sure there's any practical difference between that and saying that you are going to ignore structured technical criticism purely based on who it's coming from. The criticisms may sting, and they could probably be delivered with a bit more kindness and respect, but if they're accurate, they need to stand on their tech merit independent of the style of delivery, the natural feeling of "oh the ungrateful masses" that comes naturally after having spent a lot of time on something that gets panned, and the natural fear of negativity surrounding a community marketing effort.
I've been on both sides of this particular fence before, and it's not fun on either side. But from what I can tell of this particular issue, the Python core team has put themselves in a position where this is inevitable. They've done this by hard-line declaring "no 2.8, ever" and being maybe a bit overly conservative where it comes to making changes that make it easier to maintain cross-compatible Py2/Py3 codebases. One such change would be to make __getitem__ of bytes objects return a bytes object instead of an integer, and there are probably a hundred other little ones like that plus a bunch of structural changes like making the choice to use bytes objects at IO boundaries so as not to flout reality so grossly.
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u/mcdonc May 27 '14
IMO, "please be quiet" is not a productive response to criticisms coming from folks whom have actually already ported many lines of code and whom are now maintaining cross-compatible code bases.
I realize that's not what you mean to say, but I'm not sure there's any practical difference between that and saying that you are going to ignore structured technical criticism purely based on who it's coming from. The criticisms may sting, and they could probably be delivered with a bit more kindness and respect, but if they're accurate, they need to stand on their tech merit independent of the style of delivery, the natural feeling of "oh the ungrateful masses" that comes naturally after having spent a lot of time on something that gets panned, and the natural fear of negativity surrounding a community marketing effort.
I've been on both sides of this particular fence before, and it's not fun on either side. But from what I can tell of this particular issue, the Python core team has put themselves in a position where this is inevitable. They've done this by hard-line declaring "no 2.8, ever" and being maybe a bit overly conservative where it comes to making changes that make it easier to maintain cross-compatible Py2/Py3 codebases. One such change would be to make
__getitem__of bytes objects return a bytes object instead of an integer, and there are probably a hundred other little ones like that plus a bunch of structural changes like making the choice to use bytes objects at IO boundaries so as not to flout reality so grossly.