[Python-Dev] Fixing zipfile.BadZipfile to zipfile.BadZipFile (original) (raw)

Éric Araujo merwok at netwok.org
Wed Oct 27 18:26:26 CEST 2010

[Reply received off-list quoted here]

Le 18/10/2010 09:25, Boštjan Mejak a écrit :

Shoot. Well, too bad. I thought Python is all about readability, but I think you developers don't take it very seriously.

Readability has to be balanced with other important things: maintainability, discoverability, compatibility, rapidity and other things ending in -ity. I’m personally glad that readability gets a huge place in the language definition itself (no braces, standard indentation), I follow 98 % of PEP 8 where I can, and have learned to accept that sometimes, a piece of code in the standard lib won’t get more readable. Still beats some languages that I won’t name because dissing Java is too easy.

If I was a developer, I would certainly go to the trouble of all the rewrittes of package/module/class/method/function names that do not comply to PEP 8 and have them done by the time the first sub-version of Python 3 would be released.

You are free to break compat in your code but it python-dev has a duty to its users. Renames in threading have been deemed a good thing, renames in unittest not. You can read the python-3000 archives to get an idea of the years of work and thousands of messages that went into py3k. At some point, a release had to be done. Now that there is a stable release in the 3.x line, compatibility rules apply.

Practicality beats purity; now is better than never.

Regards

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