Serious question: did anything good come out of paying attention to Twitter? Like, ever? I'm sure it has its bubble-living adherents here. Then again, so did Quora.
As for the claim of "questioning [his] authority", isn't that a given? With or without social media. That's pretty much human nature. It's up to you to establish the tone and medium of how people interact with you. Linus, for example, is pretty much strictly email and most things go through one of the "inner circle" who are largely responsible for areas like networking. As brash as he can be, you pretty much know what to expect and you have delegation.
Honestly, I wonder how much of this goes back to GvR's handling of Python 3. This should go down as something to be studied for years on how not to do a breaking change. IIRC Python 3 was released in 2008. Here we are in 2019 with no end in sight for Python 2.7.
My favourite Python 3ism was the removal of the s and u string literal prefixes. In Python 2.0+, u'this is a string' was a Unicode literal prefix. It was removed in 3.0 for reasons that are beyond me (I know Unicode became the default for string literals) but then added back in 3.3 for backwards compatibility. Why remove it in the first place? It makes no sense. But this just went to the perception that the Python powers-that-be were removed from reality in their hubris.
Anyway, GvR... one can't help but respect his stewardship and contribution to Python. Please make no mistake about that. The weird thing about human nature is in situations like this, if the peanut gallery senses they're getting to you it only encourages them. Sad but true.
> Here we are in 2019 with no end in sight for Python 2.7
An end is in sight, is coming soon, and it’s sort of concerning that more folks haven’t realized it yet - https://pythonclock.org/
No one told me someone had put an arbitrary countdown on the Internet. Well that's completely different.
Python may not officially support 2.7 in 2020+. What's to stop someone else backporting security patches and necessary fixes as needed ad infinitum? I think you're underestimating just how little impetus there is to migrate from 2 to 3.
> No one told me someone had put an arbitrary countdown on the Internet. Well that's completely different.
No idea what I did to deserve that tone. That site also gives a high level overview of the change, which is why I linked it.
> What’s to stop someone else from backporting security fixes as needed ad infinitum?
Who? I haven’t heard anyone express a willingness to take up that mantle. “Someone will probably support it by the end of the year” is not the most robust security model.
>Who? I haven’t heard anyone express a willingness to take up that mantle.
Tauthon [0] kind of fits the bill here. It's a fork of 2.7 with some backported features from the 3 branch, so they're in a position to backport security fixes as well. How well that arrangement holds up once the PSF officially drops 2 remains to be seen, but if anybody is in a position to keep providing support it's probably them.