Abdur-Rahmaan Janhangeer writes: > No i mean fake path in the sense of a fork > of CPython with issues for learning purposes
*Creating* plausible issues is hard work, I assure you as a university professor. Coming up with "exercises" that are not makework requires expertise in both the domain and in educational psychology. (Some people are "just good at it", of course, but it's quite clear from popular textbooks that most are not.) I think that would be a very unproductive use of developer time, especially since "git clone; git checkout some-tag-in-2017" is pretty much what you're asking for otherwise. > Then people work on solving the issues on their > own without PRing. The problem is not a lack of issues to practice on. It's that (1) the PR process itself is a barrier, or at least an annoyance, and (2) many new contributors need mentoring. (Or think they do. Some just need encouragment, others need help on technique, but both groups are more or less blocked without the mentoring.) And, of course, real contribution involves a lot of unfun work. Writing tests, writing documentation, explaining to other developers who start out -1 because they don't get it, overcoming your own mental blocks to changing your submission because *you* don't get it, and on and on. A lot of newcomers think "I'm not good at that, if I have to do it I can't contribute" (and a few selfishly think they can just do the fun parts and achieve fame and fortune), but you know, "if not you, then who? If you don't do it for Python, where are you going to be able to contribute?" To be honest, although I'm not a specialist in organizational behavior and am operating with a small sample, I can say that from the point of view of identifying tasks, finding solutions, and implementing them, Python is the most effective non-hierarchical organization I've ever seen. I can't say I've seen more than one or two hierarchical organizations that are significantly better at implementing solutions and don't burn up their workers in the process -- and the ones I'm thinking of are way smaller than Python. (Yes, I know that there are people who have gotten burned up in Python, too. We can do better on that, but Python does not deliberately sacrifice people to the organization.) ISTM that Terry is right. What we need to do better is encourage people to just start contributing, and help them to get over the initial humps: git, the PR process, requests from the QA police for docs and tests and NEWS entries, etc. Terry's approach seems good to me on the face of it, and it's "battle-tested". Terry uses it and has had some successes. Maybe that process can be tweaked, but it's a good recipe. I suspect that the main reason it doesn't work for Terry outside of IDLE is that IDLE is where Terry has expertise and motivation to do emotional work: handholding at the beginning, deeper involvement in mentoring as necessary. *And that's as it should be.* It's up to the rest of us to do that work on areas *we* care about. I have to point out that there's a whole crew over on corementorship doing this work, and at least one Very Senior Developer with their own private mentoring program.[1] IMO, that is a big part of why Python is as successful as it is. If more senior developers would take on these tasks it would have a big effect downstream. But emotional work is hard, and it comes in big chunks. In many situations you have to follow through, on the mentee's schedule, or the mentee will "slip the hook and swim away." So it's a big ask. I'm willing to make that ask in the abstract, but there's not even one senior developer I'm able to point to and say "definitely that person would do more for Python by mentoring than by hacking". It's a very hard problem. Footnotes: [1] Why "private"? Well, why should the junior developers have all the fun? The VSDs want to hack too! So those programs are small and not terribly well-publicized (and they often have strong "inclusion" focuses as well as specific focus on areas of improvement). _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list -- python-dev@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-dev-le...@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-dev.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-dev@python.org/message/VZVIARBQRT3UGOY5RLJB35MUXWGLDYD5/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
