Guido van Rossum

is to community fostering things.

I probably held onto the position too long.

I remember being just extremely stressed for a long time.

And it wasn't very clear to me what was leading, what was causing the stress.

And looking back, I should have sort of relinquished my central role as BDFL sooner.

Well, the benefits for the community would be things like clarity of vision and sort of

a clear direction because I had certain ideas in mind when I created Python.

And while I sort of let myself be influenced by many other ideas as Python evolved and became more successful and more complex and more used, I also stuck to certain principles.

And it's still hard to say what are Python's core principles.

But the fact that I was playing that role and sort of always very active grew the community in a certain way.

It modeled to the community how to think about how to solve a certain problem.

Well...

It was a source of stress for me personally, but it was beneficial for the community because people sort of, over time, had learned how I was thinking and could predict how I would decide about a particular issue.

And not always perfectly, of course, but there was like...

There wasn't a lot of jerking around like this year, we're all... This year, the Democrats are in power and we're doing these kind of things.

And now the Republicans are in power and they roll all that back and do those kind of things.

There is a clear, fairly straight path ahead.

And so fortunately, the successor structure with the steering council has sort of found a similar way of

of leading the community in a fairly steady direction without stagnating.

And for me personally, it's more fun because there are things I can just ignore.