> > This information really belongs in www.python.org/dev/ rather than
> > only in the mailing list.
> >
> +1
>
> As does a recent essay by Eli Bendersky, IMO. I believe it could lower
> the barriers for entry into the "non-committer" class of developer. This
> should make it easier for people to adapt Python to their own purposes
> whether or not they want to contribute to the open source code base, but
> also encourage people to investigate the compiler's innards.

With the moratorium on language constructs and builtins (not only in
letter until 3.3, but more generally in spirit), I don't think we should
encourage it at all, for such contributions would surely be rejected.

Rather than fancy syntax propositions or wild semantic
changes/enhancements (such as have often been proposed on
python-ideas), what we need is humbler but more useful work on stdlib
bugs and improvements, as well as documentation and tutorials.

(what's more, those two kinds of contributions are likely to attract
two different kinds of people, which means that people whose syntax
patches get refused won't necessarily start contributing stdlib or
documentation patches...)

Regards

Antoine.


Antoine,

I wrote that article, and I agree with everything you say here. I just don't want my intentions to be understood incorrectly. Many readers stopped reading after the title and jumped to conclusions which simply aren't true (as some of the comments on the blog and Reddit demonstrate). Just a couple of quotes from the article itself to show that breaking the moratorium (with which I wholeheartedly agree) is far from my intentions:

-----------------------------
This article is an attempt to better understand how the front-end of Python works. Just reading documentation and source code may be a bit boring, so I’m taking a hands-on approach here: I’m going to add an until statement to Python.
[...]
This article doesn’t attempt to suggest the addition of an until statement to Python. Although I think such a statement would make some code clearer, and this article displays how easy it is to add, I completely respect Python’s philosophy of minimalism. All I’m trying to do here, really, is gain some insight into the inner workings of Python.
-----------------------------

Kind regards,
Eli