[Python-Dev] a quit that actually quits (original) (raw)

Fredrik Lundh fredrik at pythonware.com
Thu Dec 29 17:57:40 CET 2005

Guido van Rossum wrote:

Regarding the meme floating about the arrogance of Pythoneers: bloggers (pretty much by definition) are actually the most arrogant species; don't confuse "bloggers say" with "most people think".

Sure, but I'm not only talking about the mindless ranters here; it's also people that back their opinions with at least a few examples -- including exit (and its "it's good for you that you have to learn more than you want at a time when you're not interested" defenders), replies to "what's wrong with Python's floating point type" along the lines of "that you don't under- stand how floating point works", and so on.

(fwiw, this meme has also appeared on comp.lang.python quite a few times lately -- and no, I'm not confusing "comp.lang.python" with "most people" either)

I do think it's a problem that Python advocates suffer from a "everything's perfect all the time" attitude. "it ain't broke because we say so".

I think it's a larger problem that Python developers suffer from the same attitude; in reality, some things are carefully thought out and craftily im- plemented, some things are engineering tradeoffs made at a certain time, and some things are just accidents -- but python-dev will happily defend the current solution with the same energy, no matter what it is.

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