[sho_hn]

An X12 was briefly considered by the community before adopting Wayland: https://www.x.org/wiki/Development/X12/

If you take the time to read through that (very partial) list of cruft and footguns in X11 it probably makes it a little easier to understand why a clean-slate approach was able to attract momentum and why many hands-on involved developers were relatively tired of X11. Critics would of course respond that backwards compatibility is worth the effort and rewrites are often the wrong call, etc. It's the Python 2/3 debate and many others.

[PunchyHamster]

Realistically rewrite would keep X11 compatibility layer and just do same wayland did, make new protocol.

Just... without all that mess that turned out to be at best +/-, at worst outright negative causing problems for everyone involved. And near all of the "advantages" are "the server is built from scratch" not "the protocol was the limitation"

[glzone1]

Python 3 was actively antagonistic to Python 2 code for no reason other than to lecture us about how we were doing things wrong, writing code to support 2 and 3 to help transition was dumb etc etc.

For example, in python 2 you could explicitly mark unicode text with u"...". That was actively BLOCKED with python 3.0 which supposedly was about unicode support! The irony was insane, they could of just no-oped the u"". I got totally sick of the "expert" language designers with no real world code shipping responsibilities lecturing me. Every post about this stuff was met by comments from pedantic idiots. So every string had to have a helper function around it. Total and absolute garbage. They still haven't explained to my satisifaction why not support u"..." to allow a transition more easily to 3.

Luckily sanity started prevailing around 3.5 and we started to see a progression - whoever was behind this should be thanked. The clueless unicode everything was walked back and we got % for bytes so you could work with network protocols again (where unicode would be STUPID to force given the installed base). We got u"" back.

By 3.6 we got back to reasonable path handling on windows and the 3 benefits started to come without antagonistic approaches / regressions from 2. But that was about 8 years? So that burnt a lot of the initial excitement.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> Python 3 was actively antagonistic to Python 2 code for no reason other than to lecture us about how we were doing things wrong, writing code to support 2 and 3 to help transition was dumb etc etc.

> [...]

> By 3.6 we got back to reasonable path handling on windows and the 3 benefits started to come without antagonistic approaches / regressions from 2. But that was about 8 years? So that burnt a lot of the initial excitement.

So it's a great analogy. Wayland started out proudly proclaiming that it intentionally didn't support features in the name of "security" but everyone should "upgrade" because this was totally better, and has been very slowly discovering that actually all the stuff it willfully dropped was useful and has mostly evolved back to near feature parity with Xorg.

[imtringued]

Uhm no? As I mentioned, Wayland is simple because it was designed with the idea that there will be many implementations. It turns out that once you have many implementations, you can't just implement screen recording in one implementation and directly integrate with that implementation, because someone might use a different implementation. This then necessitates extensions for features that go beyond displaying things.

[reactordev]

There’s a reason they’re called Pythonistas

It’s always drama and they’re the center of it.

(I’m joking of course, Merry Christmas)

[someguyiguess]

Python is really one of the worst designed languages. It always baffles me that people recommend it to beginners.

[cons0le]

15 years ago I tried it and got that path error. 1 year ago I tried again and still got the same error. I'm well aware that it's simple enough to fix. But I was baffled that the same error was still there.

[IshKebab]

I dunno there's a lot to pick from when it comes to "worst designed"!

It's definitely not well designed though.

And I agree about recommending it to beginners. Sure, a for-loop and a simple function look very friendly and easy, but good luck explaining to them why they can't import from a file in a different directory...

[zbentley]

Except for all the others (that anyone uses)…

[reactordev]

I’ve been here since the beginning.

I remember Usenet.

X11 was built for multi-user terminals a kin to today’s Microsoft VDI garbage.

There’s some good. A lot of bad. And some WTF in there.