[Python-Dev] Benchmarks why we need PEP 576/579/580 (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Sun Jul 22 18:28:39 EDT 2018

On Sun, Jul 22, 2018 at 1:11 PM, Jeroen Demeyer <J.Demeyer at ugent.be> wrote:

On 2018-07-22 14:52, Stefan Behnel wrote:

Someone has to maintain the existing code base and help newcomers to get into it and understand it.

This is an important point that people seem to be overlooking. The complexity and maintenance burden of PEP 580 should be compared to the status-quo. The existing code is complicated, yet nobody seems to find that a problem. But when PEP 580 makes changes to that complicated code (and documents some of the existing complexity), it's suddenly the fault of PEP 580 that the code is complicated. I also wonder if there is a psychological difference simply because this is a PEP and not an issue on bugs.python.org. That might give the impression that it's a more serious thing somehow. Previous optimizations ( https://bugs.python.org/issue26110 for example) were not done in a PEP and nobody ever mentioned that the extra complexity might be a problem. Finally, in some ways, my PEP would actually be a simplification because it replaces several special cases by one general protocol. Admittedly, the general protocol that I propose is more complicated than each existing special case individually but the overall complexity might actually decrease.

So does your implementation of the PEP result in a net increase or decrease of the total lines of code? I know that that's a poor proxy for complexity (we can all imagine example bits of code that would become less complex by rewriting them in more lines), but if your diff actually deleted more lines than it adds, that would cut short a lot of discussion. I have a feeling though that that's not the case, and now you're in the defense.

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