[Python-Dev] ESR on slashdot

[Mark Hammond]

Just as a matter of interest, here is a question put to ESR and his
answer.  We certainly could do alot worse than to have ESR becoming a
real Python advocate :-)  If only Guido himself could find time to
work on 1.6, we would be "in like Flynn" :-)

Mark.

shawnhargreaves asks:
You've always been involved in hacker projects outside of just coding
(eg. the Jargon File), but over the last year or so the spokesperson
role seems to have grown into a fulltime job. How long is it since you
last sat down to write a major piece of software? Do you expect to go
back to fulltime development work anytime soon, and if so, what would
you work on? How do you manage to cope with the withdrawal symptoms?

ESR answers:
An astute question ;-). I haven't sat down to write a major piece of
software from scratch in months, but I am continuing to maintain
fetchmail. I just took over the gif2png beta code with Greg Roelofs's
consent; the 1.0.0 version might be out by the time you read this.
Today I did some work on gnuplot, bringing the PNG driver up to date.

If I get to go full-time again soon, I want to go back to work on
Trove, the distributed web-based code-archiving system I designed last
year. I'd also like to work with Guido van Rossum on Python 1.6; there
are some long-time wishlist features like rich comparisons and a full
lambda facility that I care enough about to implement myself. I also
have a strategy-gaming system I wrote back in the 1980s that I'd like
to put a modern (Web-based) interface on. Finally, having contributed
a bit of code to GNOME (the network-monitor applet) I'd like to
balance things by doing something for KDE.