At 06:40 PM 7/15/2009 +0100, Paul Moore wrote:

And of course, someone has to do the clean-up. It seems to me that the fact that people are more inclined to reinvent the code than to try to understand the existing codebase and pick out the relevant bits, says something important about how easy it would be to maintain the existing code within the Python core...

That's normal for any code that contains "legacy" issues, which is why people always prefer rewriting code they don't understand: it's more fun to write than to read. However, as Joel Spolsky has well explained, rewriting such code inevitably means that you must re-learn the lessons that were learned by the original author. It seems like a waste, but then, I suppose those lessons must be relearned *some* way. I just think it'd be better if, having re-learned most of the lessons by trying to rewrite, one could then go back and learn the rest from the code. ;-) That having been said, it's obviously a dead parrot... one which I will now cease attempting to revive.