| > Just another BDFL, that's it. I think a lesson to take from this is that the concept of a "BDFL" doesn't really stand up. Putting an individual in charge dramatically increases the chances that they will suffer some kind of burn out compared to a situation where there are more people to share the burden with. That means the "For Life" part is more like "until they decide it's not worth the grief". It's also clear that the "Dictator" part isn't really true; the stated reason for Guido leaving the project was the difficulty he had in getting the wider community to agree to a change he was in favour of. The idea that having a single individual in charge produces a consistency of design seems false over the long term. Each time you burn through one leader you have to pick a new one who might have a relatively different aesthetic sense or set of priorities. And individuals change. Someone who was indifferent to functional programming, for example, in 1995 could be a huge advocate of it 20 years later, making quite different design decisions as a result. Instead I would strongly encourage the Python community to look at what the Rust community have been doing. Leadership there is group-based, and the core team sets out an explicit vision for the project each year. This allows feedback from the community on direction and enables changes to be assessed against the explicit shared vision (vs assuming that vision exists in someone's head in the BDFL model). Ther exists a process for making changes that ensures that all (unique) feedback is considered before making a change, so that when decisions are made they're made based on shared facts. There is also emphasis on growing contributers into leadership positions, which togther with the team-based approach provides continuity when people move on from the project. I'm not claiming it's a perfect system, but it seems to be working relatively well in a language that is going through a much more active phase (in terms of adding features) than Python. |
That is what “for life” means lots of the time outside of BDFL, too.
Federal judges retire, too. Monarchs and even regular, non-benevolent dictators abdicate or otherwise step down.