On Tue, 23 Jul 2019 at 04:58, Kyle Stanley <aeros167@gmail.com> wrote:
My primary motivation was to provide more explicit declaration of public vs private, not only for the purpose of shifting the responsibility to the authors, but also to shift the liability of using private members to the user.
My view is that the current somewhat adhoc, "consenting adults" approach has served us well for many years now. There have been a few cases where we've needed to address specific points of confusion, but mostly things have worked fine. With Python's increased popularity, there has been an influx of new users with less familiarity with Python's easy-going attitude, and consequently an increase in pressure for more "definite", or "explicit" rules. While it's great to see newcomers arrive with new ideas, and it's important to make their learning experience as pleasant as possible, we should also make sure that we don't lose the aspects of Python that *made* it popular in the process. And to my mind, that easy-going, "assume the users know what they are doing" attitude is a key part of Python's appeal. So I'm -1 on any global change of this nature, particularly if it is motivated by broad, general ideas of tightening up rules or making contracts more explicit rather than a specific issue. The key point about making changes on a "case by case" basis is *not* about doing bits of the fix when needed, but about having clear, practical issues that need addressing, to guide the decision on what particular fix is appropriate in any given situation. Paul