[Python-Dev] User's complaints (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Thu Jul 13 16:20:33 CEST 2006

Somebody whose name doesn't matter (it's not about him) wrote:

When some of us first saw what PEP 3000 suggested we were thinking: shit, there goes Python. [...]

And later in the same message the same person wrote:

Things that struck me as peculiar is the old:

if name == "main": whatever() This is so out of tune with the rest of python it becomes a nuisance.

This is an illustration of the dilemma of maintaining a popular language: Everybody hates change (me too!) but everybody also has one thing that's bothering them so much they absolutely want it to be changed. If you were to implement all those personal pet peeves, you'd get a language that's more different from Python than Python is from Fortran.

So where's the middle ground? I believe it's established without a doubt that in biological evolution, changes comes in spurts: A species may change hardly at all for millions of years, and then suddenly, due to not quite understood mechanisms, it starts to change rapidly until a completely new species (or several) has evolved, which again remains stable for a long time.

I don't want to adopt this time scale for Python (:-), but I do think it's useful to think of language evolution as a kind of fractal movement -- at every time scale, there are small jumps and the occasional large jump. Python 2.2 was a fairly large jump (new-style classes, iterators, generators, decorators). Python 3000 will be the largest jump so far. There will be larger jumps yet in the distant future. But in between, there will be long periods of (relative) stability.

Will it hurt? You bet! But for many species, sooner or later it's evolve or become extinct.

-- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

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