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Knowing how stubborn and aloof Richard tends to be, it is a huge surprise that this has happened at all, let alone so quickly. I can only imagine there was an immense amount of pressure from the board, partner projects, and sponsors.

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At his level, "fired" and "resigned" are often synonyms.

Or maybe, as with Guido van Rossum (in an unrelated context), he's had a bellyful of our contemporary variations on the French Revolution.

For the uninitiated, what happened with Guido van Rossum?

Very unrelated issue - he resigned after the flamewars regarding PEP 572 (the addition of an assignment expression ':='). After it had gone on for a while, he finally used his BDFL authority to shut down debate and approve the PEP, and then resigned shortly after. In particular, he felt that the Python Code of Conduct's requirement for civility was being completely ignored in attacks on him in social media.

See https://lwn.net/Articles/757713/ for background, and https://lwn.net/Articles/759654/ for his resignation letter.

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