Much of the popularity of Python is based upon third party libraries that have been contributed by both individuals and organizations. These are still contributions, and there are many cases where the contributors are paid.
Should Python receive more funding and pay more people to work on the language? Probably, yet it is doubtful that having a large team working on the core language will improve the health of the language.
They talk about maintaining Python, which includes things like preparing and managing releases. Why would you need more than a few people to do that? The core language itself also evolves at a slow pace (which is good), it's not that there are tons of new features every year that get merged into the codebase, so a few FTEs is probably adequate to handle that kind of work.
Considering the larger Python ecosystem the community does a lot of the work, so saying there are only two people working full-time on Python is quite misleading IMHO, as Python has probably one of the largest communities in the world for a programming language, the Github repo alone lists almost 1.500 contributors.
That's not completely true. It would be trivial to find people to work on Python 3 support if they were paid. It's just finding the volunteers that's hard.
There's a lot of important work that happens in python. Most of it isn't being done by software engineers. I think the idea of improving things for that group is plenty meaningful.
Its such a statement about the free rider problem that python can have only 2 people working fulltime on it. Python is one of the most popular languages in the world - there's got to be trillions of dollars worth of companies depending on it. Small improvements to the language would result in millions of dollars of productivity gains in aggregate globally.
And yet ... collectively we can only find enough money to pay two full time salaries?! Seriously?
Who are "they"? I imagine the overlap between people working on the core python language and people maintaining popular third party libraries is pretty small. Or are you suggesting that Van Rossum and friends drop python development for a year and start hacking on NLTK and PIL instead?
I'm not confident that's a bad thing, and I worry that we're judging languages on metrics that only make sense for startups. Does a language need to chase growth?
I'm not saying Python shouldn't improve. But, if it comes to it, Python shouldn't cannibalize the niche it filled to do so. That will just spark other languages to fill the niche again.
Maybe. But I would personally guess that most people nowadays are way too eager to use a new library than would be good for their projects in the long run. I very much doubt that most new libraries are that much better than the Python standard library counterparts that it’s worth using them in non-toy projects. Of course, all progress depends on the unreasonable man, etc.
More money for OSS is always great. Does the PSF employ full time engineers to work on Python? For some reason my mental model of core Python contributors was that they worked at a company which paid them to work mostly on the language, but also on other company specific things. Maybe because that’s how Golang seems to work? IDK, genuinely curious.
It's a matter of resources. I donated, and I invite everyone earning money with Python to do the same (http://pypy.org/py3donate.html).
More generally, the Python community really lacks money compared to other ones. GO, PHP and JS all have bigs players spending a lot of cash on it. While some companies does invest in Python, they don't spend nearly the same amount on it, and the PSF has a very tigh budget.
One of the reason is that Python is "good enough", and so people don't invest on it because they don't need more from it. While JS was so slow that Google spent millions to create the V8. It's sad, but being clean and robust and strongly community driven leads to a lack of funding for Python. I wish we had a Mark shuttlework for the language.
All the evidence is 2 Full Time Developers are equal to the workload. People aren't using Python because it is going to be good enough in the future, it is good enough now.
If more people are working on it full time, we'll just get more Walrus Operators. A very hypothetical gain at cost of an increasingly complex core language.
That's a pretty distorted view IMHO. There are a lot of people that are working in the Python ecosystem and improve the language, and while they are not directly paid by the PSF their employers give them time to devote to working on Python. I think e.g. GvR had plenty of freedom to work on his Python projects while at Dropbox. I know a lot of companies in Germany that give people ample time to go to Python conferences and engage with the community, as it's also a way to meet and recruit good Python developers.
So it might be true that there are only a few FTEs working on Python, but the larger community of people contributing to it is much larger.
More important than the number is that the foundation actually pays the core developers. Python suffers from having almost exclusively volunteer work and those volunteers often are not interested in solving the problems of the foundation or community (eg: packaging etc.).
The most the PSF could do is “bolt on” a developer to solve packaging in yet another non embraced and supported way.
Much of the popularity of Python is based upon third party libraries that have been contributed by both individuals and organizations. These are still contributions, and there are many cases where the contributors are paid.
Should Python receive more funding and pay more people to work on the language? Probably, yet it is doubtful that having a large team working on the core language will improve the health of the language.
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