On Sun, 20 Feb 2022 at 08:05, Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:
There is no way to make a popular vote fair.
That's an odd take.
A better take is that, fair or not, popularity is not necessarily a good judge of what works well in a language. Language design requires skill and taste, and it is not obvious that the wisdom of the crowd extends that far.
A problem with most online votes is that participation is self-selected. There is no way to measure turnout, and therefore, it is impossible to tell how representative the voters are for the community at large. If voting is limited to a select group (which could be as small as Python core developers, or as large as anyone who has ever had a pull request merged into cpython, or something in-between), then a vote could be a way to measure opinions after a lengthy discussion fails to reach a consensus. Gerrit.