On Fri, Sep 12, 2008 at 1:29 PM, Cliff Wells
A slow boat still reaches its destination. My position is that by obviating the need for a large class of syntax extensions, the onus is moved from the Python core team onto the user desiring a particular extension and by doing so, things like community pressure to add X can be reduced and by extension, the likelihood of the process folding under that pressure becomes much less likely.
Again, a vast difference in what we consider complexity. For a user, does it matter that we use "len(foo)" rather than "len foo"? A little bit, but it's not huge. For the language developers, does it matter? Again, it's a small benefit. It's still our job to design it, not a third-party. Syntax and stdlib are both part of the language. All the things you think we might avoid by being more "functional", we'd still have to do them, saving nothing. Except all the details suggest *worse* solutions would be found, as we wouldn't be fine-tuning the syntax for the use-cases. The only genuine use-case for your changes I've seen in this whole thread is the dispatch-dict, but your changes are far too distract to justify it. As an aside, I can't speak for Guido, but I haven't seen any indication python's development process may collapse. It's a non-problem. -- Adam Olsen, aka Rhamphoryncus