Chris Angelico writes:
It's good to have a bit of inertia, so that status quo gets maintained, but at the moment, the extent to which ideas get shot down makes it look as if this list is python-idea-killing. This keeps happening.
I don't see lots of *good* ideas for syntax changes here. Most of the ideas that show up, like filtered iteration, are *really* marginal. They're marginal in the number of people who think they're really an improvement, and even for those folks they're typically "nice to haves" at best. And then somebody comes along and says "ok, I'll overcome my anti-syntax inertia if you show me that this could actually be used somewhat frequently", but that's apparently too much effort. Sorry, but I'm perfectly happy to see those ideas go away at that point. But they don't have to if the proponent doesn't want them to. As Paul points out this list can't approve *or* kill an idea. This list is supposed to be for *improving* ideas before submitting them for a decision. If the discussion leads to impasse, and the proponent still thinks it's a good idea, they can, and should, either request judgment from the SC or directly submit a merge request if it's the kind of thing that only needs one core dev. Personally, I'm pretty conservative. I'm pretty happy with the ideas that get through the process, and with those that don't. Since you're not -- you think more improvements should be accepted -- I think it's mostly on you and those who feel as you do to help people who have good ideas to recognize when they've reached impasse and more to a forum where a decision will be made. (Note that I'm not asking anyone to do this for their own ideas; that's really hard.) I don't know if this is the kind of thing that can be documented, but if so that might help.
All the successful ideas seem to happen elsewhere, notably on typing-sig.
Typing is a poor example. typing-sig has done a good job of keeping its promise to use only existing syntax. The only typing-inspired syntax change I can remember is variable annotations, and that was a really big deal for typing. So typing can basically make decisions within its own community, independently of this list, and often the Steering Council as well. It's also a much younger than Python itself; of course it's going to progress faster. Steve