I think PG's background as an actual programmer and having a computational paradigm versus Arrington's sophistry is an underlying factor here too.
HN user
tchon
Hacker and founder
Yes, 5 basis points is complete and utter crap. If you're going to work crazy hours, you might as well benefit from it proportionally. Gone are the days in tech when early employees would be rewarded for taking pay cuts in exchange for a higher amount of equity only to be completely diluted by each round of funding and the greediness of the MBA holding business founders.
NOTE: there's brokenness lurking in urllib and email modules. The python library modules are more often than not modeled on perfect reality rather than a pragmatic one (e.g., complete violations of RFCs). BTW, if one reads re.py in the dist, you'll notice that it hasn't been touched by Fredrik Lundh since 2001!
I should say I still love python. Its the most fun I've had programming next to Scheme, and well, NodeJS is kind of fun too (in an algol way).