[Distutils] Brian Goetz - Stewardship: the Sobering Parts

[Robert McGibbon]

Hi,

Thanks for sharing that video, Donald.

In context, I don't think it's fair to characterize the speaker's
perspective as *dangerous*, or of categorically favoring current users over
potential new users. Obviously there are a lot of tradeoffs around backward
compatibility, and no one-sized-fits-all solutions.

One of the most powerful points Brian made is that the large user base of
Java (or Python, etc) is an immensely powerful source of leverage. Each
incremental improvement to the language, standard library, or associated
tools will almost immediately impact a lot of users and improve their
lives. It's kind of an obvious point, but I think he expressed it very well.

On that note, I lurk on this list regularly, but generally don't really
contribute. I do see the awesome work that ya'll are putting in on a day to
day basis, and I see the results in the wild. Thanks to all of your hard
work, the packaging situation has vastly improved, and continues to do so,
especially with pip and wheels. All your hard work has definitely made my
life better, for one.

Best,
Robert

On Sun, Nov 1, 2015 at 3:12 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 31 October 2015 at 14:15, Wayne Werner <waynejwerner at gmail.com> wrote:
> > First, do no harm, eh?
>
> I haven't had time to watch it yet so I don't have the full context of
> the observation, but that's only true if current users are considered
> categorically more important than future users. That's a dangerous
> line of thinking, as it means the cognitive burden of learning a
> language and ecosystem can only ever grow, and never shrink (since
> superseded concepts are never pruned from the set of things you need
> to learn, and you're also never really able to fix design mistakes
> resulting from limited perspectives in early iterations).
>
> Large scale migration projects like the shift away from implementation
> defined behaviour in the Python packaging ecosystem are cases where
> reducing barriers to entry for *new* users has edged out compatibility
> for existing users as a priority - the latter is still important, it's
> just acceptable for the level of compatibility to be less than 100%.
>
> Regards,
> Nick.
>
> P.S. From a medical perspective, there are certainly cases were
> doctors *do* inflict a lesser harm (e.g. amputations) to avoid a
> greater harm (e.g. death). "We saved the limb, but lost the patient"
> isn't one of the available options.
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