Raymond Hettinger shares lessons from fifteen years of Python core development, discussing stability, refactoring, and user-centric design.
PyBay 2016 Keynote
What I've learned from being a maintainer and core developer for the past 15 years. Thoughts on channeling Guido, stability, hyper-generalization, Sturgeon's law and egativity, evaluating submissions, inability to predict the future, user centric design, treating mature code differently, believing in or doubting your predecessors, lever arguments and completers, problems of too many choices, implementation details, how much to document, needs of the standard library versus the needs of users, code that is dead on arrival and how PyPI changed everything, orthogonality, importance of skill and expertise, consistency and foolish consistency, optimization and premature optimization, security tautologies, argument ordering, operator abuse, avoiding race to implementation (we can all write working code), the naming of parts, economy of force and complexity balance, feature creep, developing for others, over reliance on Guido, great minds don't think alike, preference for compactness, and aversion to deprecations. What it means to be completely reliant on long term unpaid volunteers.
Bio:
Raymond has been a prolific contributor to the CPython project for over a decade, having implemented and maintained many of Python's great features. He has been instrumental in modules like bisect, collections, decimal, functools, itertools, math, random, with types like namedtuple, sets, dictionaries, and in many other places around the codebase. He has contributed to the modification of nearly 90,000 lines of code in the CPython repository, and has made over 160 changes in the PEP repository.
Raymond has also served as a director of the Python Software Foundation, and has mentored many people over the years on their contributions to the python-dev community. He's also well known for his contributions to the Python Cookbook, and shares many pieces of Python wisdom on Twitter. He received the Distinguished Service Award at PyCon 2014 for his exceptional contributions to the python community.
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