geremy condra writes:
Didn't say it was a democracy. Assumed that it would still involve some input from its user base. Is that wrong?
Your phrase "popularly supported" is ambiguous. If you mean "attracts widespread support in the form of description of varied and plausible use cases" for new syntax and built-ins, or something like that, I'm sure the answer is "yes". The question posed by the moratorium proposal is, "When?" It seems to me that what Guido is heading for here is very similar to the "punctuated equilibrium" concept (associated with the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, the wikipedia article is pretty good, and fairly short). The basic idea is that long periods of relative stability are "punctuated" by periods of rapid evolution. In biology, the "bleeding edge" involves literal deaths, and Nature doesn't hesitate to waste large percentages of a population over the "stable" period as well as decimating it during the rapid evolution phases. In software, it may make sense to have the stable periods be *much* more stable, since artificial systems are more fragile than natural ones. C, because it occupies an "ecological niche" as a high-level assembly language, has been quite static since its original definition, even when it evolves. Python need not be, since its niche is very different. But it makes sense to propose to compress the evolution into short periods with many changes, and have very stable periods of "moratorium" between. Whether it will work well or not, we'll have to try it to see. But it's not just Guido's intuition that says it will work to the advantage of Python.