On Sun, 6 Mar 2022 at 22:43, Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> wrote:
On Mon, 7 Mar 2022 at 09:33, Paul Moore <p.f.moore@gmail.com> wrote:
Do I care enough to write a PEP? No. So this, like many other small ideas, will probably die on the vine.
Yes, this is the real problem. It's simply not compelling enough, even for supporters of the idea, for them to do the necessary work to make it happen.
It is indeed a problem. When a good idea dies because it is simply too hard to get through the hassles of pushing it to a decision, there is a fundamental problem. 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.
I agree - there are a lot of people here who will strongly defend the status quo, as well as a lot of people who simply like to argue for arguing's sake. But it's worth remembering that "survive python-ideas" is *not* part of the PEP process. And it's *also* worth remembering that Python is now so big, and so popular, that change is far more costly than it used to be.
This keeps happening. All the successful ideas seem to happen elsewhere, notably on typing-sig.
What I take away from this is that if you have a good idea, you don't *need* to put it through python-ideas, and if you do, getting shot down on python-ideas doesn't mean your idea is dead. But it *does* mean that if you take your idea to python-ideas, you have to accept that not everyone will like it, and be prepared to defend/justify it in *spite* of that. That's (in theory) OK, because it encourages you to focus on writing a PEP that contains objective reasons why your proposal is worthwhile. But it's also bad, because it makes python-ideas a hostile environment that puts new people off, and burns long-time contributors out. The ideas that I see failing here are often "I think X would be neat", or "We should do Y because it's like X which already exists". Those may not be bad ideas, but they need fleshing out. A PEP that says "a bunch of people on python-ideas things X would be neat" is not going to get accepted any more than one that just says that you think it's a neat idea. The *tone* on python-ideas is (unnecessarily) hostile, but I'd like to assume that the *intent* is helpful. For example, "why do you need X, we can already do it in this way" can be read as "your idea isn't needed", but it can also be read as "you need to think about why your idea is better than the current way, and be able to articulate that clearly and persuasively (for the PEP at least)". Personally, I *always* intend my responses to be taken as helpful, even if I sometimes get derailed into side-arguments about details where I'm not focused on the main proposal, and I then become more confrontational (I apologise that this happens, but I'm only human ;-)). Maybe things would be better if python-ideas were more positive, encouraging, and supportive. But I don't know how to make that happen - people didn't sign up here to mentor potential PEP authors, after all. Paul