[Python-Dev] vox populii illiterati (original) (raw)

M.-A. Lemburg mal@lemburg.com
Sun, 09 Feb 2003 15:42:59 +0100

Guido van Rossum wrote:

I very much appreciate Guido putting forward a PEP on if expressions, but I must say the idea of letting c.l.p 'vote' on it is unwelcome. Voting only makes sense when an electorate is educated enough to properly understand the proposition and its consequences; the discussion so far makes clear that that isn't true. Programming languages need to be designed, not agglutinated. (Otherwise you get Perl and Fortran 2000 (:->)

Part of my "cunning plan" is to show that indeed this doesn't work. I'm hoping you will forgive me this once-only Macchiavellian move. :-)

I think it is fair to say that being the head designer of a language can lead to frustration at times; I had to endure it on a much smaller scale and it was very hard to keep patiently explaining how the features had to fit together, and how they had to be both parseable and implementable and learnable, and that not every little difficulty is worth a language feature. I admit I've lost some of my patience. Showing that there is immense resistance to if-then-else expressions (even if there is also a lot of pressure to add them) would make it easier in the future to explain why they aren't there.

Good plan :-)

Except maybe one nit: some of us here in python-dev don't read c.l.p, so their vote wouldn't get taken into account. Even though you didn't want this to be discussed here, I hope you don't mind posting my -1 here.

-- Marc-Andre Lemburg eGenix.com

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