Guido van Rossum wrote:
Regarding the meme floating about the arrogance of Pythoneers: bloggers (pretty much by definition) are actually the most arrogant species; don't confuse "bloggers say" with "most people think".
Sure, but I'm not only talking about the mindless ranters here; it's also people that back their opinions with at least a few examples -- including exit (and its "it's good for you that you have to learn more than you want at a time when you're not interested" defenders), replies to "what's wrong with Python's floating point type" along the lines of "that you don't under- stand how floating point works", and so on. (fwiw, this meme has also appeared on comp.lang.python quite a few times lately -- and no, I'm not confusing "comp.lang.python" with "most people" either) I do think it's a problem that Python advocates suffer from a "everything's perfect all the time" attitude. "it ain't broke because we say so". I think it's a larger problem that Python developers suffer from the same attitude; in reality, some things are carefully thought out and craftily im- plemented, some things are engineering tradeoffs made at a certain time, and some things are just accidents -- but python-dev will happily defend the current solution with the same energy, no matter what it is. </F>