On 16/06/2020 20:02, Guido van Rossum wrote:
> Very few stars. This suggests not many people care about this problem, and
> that in turn might explain the lukewarm response you find everywhere.

This seems to be the core, and combined with the cost of measuring
performance impacts of adding a new field, it may well not be worth it
from a Python developer's perspective.
I see it clearly now.

> Lastly, I have to ask: Why is this so important to you? What does this
> prevent you from doing? You have illustrated the problem with toy examples
> -- but what is the real-world problem you're encountering (apparently
> regularly) that causes you to keep pushing on this? This needs to be
> explored especially since so few other people appear to need this to work.

I do all nearly my Python development work on Jupyter notebooks.
One thing I miss is getting the class source code (via Jupyter
Notebook's ??). When things get large and complicated enough, it seems
that I end up trying to look at my own code.

The other part is that I might be overly fond of manipulating Python
programs themselves. For example, PyTorch (a library sometimes used for
machine learning) sports a JIT for a subset of Python and I spent some
time trying to see why they can parse functions but not classes (instead
they look at the methods one by one on instances of the class, which
works, but always feels like a work-around). Before that method came
about, I tried for a while to work with classes directly, and this is
was a large part of the original motivation of looking to fix access to
source code.

In hindsight, it would seem that this feature is mostly interesting to
tool developers, not the general population, and again, I can see why
it's a very niche feature that likely isn't worth going through the
process of adding support for from Python's perspective.

Thank you for taking the time to consider my request, I sincerely
appreciate it and I learned a great deal from our conversation and it
makes me feel much better about the ill fate of my proposed patch.

Best regards

Thomas