[Python-Dev] If you shadow a module in the standard library that IDLE depends on, bad things happen (original) (raw)

Paul Moore p.f.moore at gmail.com
Thu Oct 29 15:13:08 EDT 2015

On 29 October 2015 at 18:46, Laura Creighton <lac at openend.se> wrote:

In a message of Thu, 29 Oct 2015 18:27:59 +0000, Paul Moore writes:

The idle issues seem to me to demonstrate that shadowing the stdlib is a bad idea. Of course, consenting adults, and if you override you're responsible for correctly replacing the functionality, and all that, but honestly, I don't think it needs to be easy to shadow the stdlib - there's nothing wrong with it being an "advanced" technique that people have to understand in order to use. I am actually sick of the 'consenting adults' argument. I am dealing with '11 year old children trying to write their first, third and tenth python programs'. For the life of me I cannot see how convenience for the sort of person who has a legitimate reason to shadow the syslib should get a higher priority over these mites who are doing their damndest to write python despite natural language barriers and the fact that their peers and parents think they are nuts to want to do so.

That's actually a very good point, and I agree totally. To my mind, the point about "consenting adults" (and when I referred to that I was anticipating others using that argument, not proposing it myself) is that we don't prevent people from doing weird and wonderful things. But conversely, it's not a reason for making it easy to do such things. Quite the opposite - a "consenting adult" should be assumed to be capable of writing an import hook, or manipulating sys.path, or whatever.

Paul

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