They introduced levels 2.5 years ago. Almost all existing engineers were converted to L5 at that time (I was told ~90% during a recent job interview there). A very small number of L6s were created when they introduced levels (something like 20 according to my interviewer). L4s are post-9/2022 hires.
All of which is to say, the fact that most people are L5s, including people who've been there for a long time, is due entirely to the very recent introduction of leveling and the high bar for L6. It tells you nothing on its own about whether L5 is perceived as a terminal level.
You'd know better than us if you work there, and reading between the lines of your comment it sounds like maybe it is?
Not my area of engineering, so forgive me, but: is an external DDOS a plausible threat for competently engineered public service in 2025? I kind of got the impression those were solved problems in practice?
Were the "various overblown controversies" when he said "There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity, maybe it's a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews. I mean there is always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn't just pick on them for no reason"?
Or when he said the United States is "utterly dominated by the great Jewish financial institutions over there"?
Or when he said "I am certainly anti-Israel, and I have become anti-Semitic"?
I was the owner of the domain potooooo.ooo from June 2020 to July 2021. I was pretty bored during early lockdown. I let it lapse. whois tells me someone else has now fallen into the trap of the $30 dad joke.
For what it's worth, the use case that caused me to finally "get" chatbots was as a support while reading the Aubrey-Maturin series. The first conversation in my Claude history is me asking it "Compare the relative strengths of cannon and carronades. Which was more accurate?"
Again, python does not use semantic versioning. 3.12 and 3.13 are different major versions. The deprecation policy is documented and public. https://peps.python.org/pep-0387/.
1. That python 3 statement was not drawn up by "the Python maintainers". It was drawn up by downstream library owners.
2. To the extent you object to changes in the core language, the python maintainers do have a backwards compatibility statement and prominent timelines for deprecation. You may disagree with these, but they are public.
3. At the time it was written, the python 3 statement proposed dropping support for a version of python with known security problems and no plans for security updates. It seems like your argument is with the python 2 to python 3 transition, which feels like a conversation we've had here before.
> "except:" is explicit enough and "except BaseException" is redundant.
Take that up with the consensus view of the python community, as reflected by python linters in their default configuration, almost all of which warn on bare except.
The debate in the PEP is whether this should be a syntax error. The debate about whether it is good style is over though.
> It's also not worth breaking production code over this.
Anyone reading your code is going to assume this is a bug. The PEP is right that explicit is better than implicit. You should write `except BaseException` (whether or not this PEP is approved).
Personally I think that would have been a better choice in Python's original design, but to change it now would be a backwards-incompatible change, i.e. it suffers from the same big problem everyone is highlighting in the PEP.
There are two "problems" this PEP is trying to solve.
One is that bare excepts are permitted. The argument against this is that explicit is better than implicit. A matter of taste, but I don't find this convincing.
The other problem is what bare excepts mean. Bare excepts are syntactic sugar for `except BaseException`. This means that an application containing a bare `except` followed by the vast majority of real-world error handling will continue to run even if SystemExit or KeyboardInterrupt is raised. This is almost always a bug.
I do find this second argument convincing, and I wish Python did not contain this design wart.
If I could go back in time and change Python syntax, it would make it hard for people to silently treat these special interrupts as "handleable" like regular errors. The tiny set of applications that really can and should handle them (e.g. TUIs or the mailman example discussed in the final section of the PEP) can explicitly do so with e.g. `except KeyboardInterrurpt` or even `except BaseException`.
But I agree with the consensus here that this does not rise to the level of something being worth a backwards-incompatible change.
All of which is to say, the fact that most people are L5s, including people who've been there for a long time, is due entirely to the very recent introduction of leveling and the high bar for L6. It tells you nothing on its own about whether L5 is perceived as a terminal level.
You'd know better than us if you work there, and reading between the lines of your comment it sounds like maybe it is?