On the contrary, I think it's great that they're sponsoring PyCon! I'd love to see more companies get involved, including the one I work for. I was merely pointing out the hypocrisy (for lack of a better term) of them sponsoring PyCon and then nuking their Python SDK.
There's no reason why Facebook, with their size and engineering talent, shouldn't be able to allocate the resources to maintain their Python SDK. Making it the 20% project of a single engineer would be enough, I should think, with a few extra hours thrown in when major API changes come through. Even if they let the community drive the bulk of development, they really can't spare a few hours a week to look over bug reports and pull requests?
It's easy to write a check, but I'd like to see them take some real action and make Python a first-class citizen for Facebook app development.
You may not like the company, and you are entitled to have that view (I might even share it!), but to state that everyone that works there in some form of engineering capacity is lacking of praise for their engineering feats is quite disingenuous.
Take a look at all the different repos they have on their github page, along with projects like HipHop-PHP, Cassandra, Tornado and the thousands of commits they have contributed to MySQL, PHP, memcached, Varnish. Let alone the number of sites they integrate with and their active user base, Facebook's engineers are quite intelligent and have solved some amazing problems. I'd like to think that most of HN thinks like engineers and marketers, positions that generally do best when their time isn't wasted by flinging mud for political "gain". Please keep it that way.
There's no reason why Facebook, with their size and engineering talent, shouldn't be able to allocate the resources to maintain their Python SDK. Making it the 20% project of a single engineer would be enough, I should think, with a few extra hours thrown in when major API changes come through. Even if they let the community drive the bulk of development, they really can't spare a few hours a week to look over bug reports and pull requests?
It's easy to write a check, but I'd like to see them take some real action and make Python a first-class citizen for Facebook app development.