Guido van Rossum

I'm not a very poetic person, and I don't shed tears like that, but no.

We actually had planned a party, but the party was planned for the US Python conference that year, which never happened, of course, because of the pandemic.

Oh, was it like in March or something?

Yeah, the conference was going to be, I think, late April that year.

Oh.

So that was a very difficult decision to cancel it, but...

They did.

So anyway, if we're going to have a Python 4, we're going to have to have both a different reason for having that and a different process for managing the transition.

Well, so...

Here is a concrete thought I've had, and I'm not unique, but not everyone agrees with this, so this is definitely a personal opinion.

If we were to try something like that Nogil Python, my expectation is that it would feel just different enough

at least for the part of the Python ecosystem that is heavily based on C extensions.

And that is like the entire machine learning, data science, scientific Python world is all based on C extensions for Python.

And so...

Those people would likely feel the pain the most because they...

even if we don't change anything about the syntax of the language and the semantics of the language when you're writing Python code, we could even say, suppose that after Python, say, 3.19 instead of 3.20, we'll have 4.0.

Suppose that's the time when we flip the switch to 4.0, we'll not have a GIL.

Imagine it was like that.

So...

I would probably say that particular year, the release that we named 4.0 will be syntactically, it will not have any new syntactical features.