Guido van Rossum wrote:
On Sun, Jul 19, 2009 at 11:29 AM, Jan Kaliszewski<zuo@chopin.edu.pl> wrote:
Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org> wrote:
The 'where' proposal actually looks nice to me. (Maybe I've been studying functional languages too much lately :-). My biggest problem with this concrete proposal is that 'where' means something completely different in SQL (which I've also studied too much lately :-).
However, I think we should focus on keeping the language stable rather than keep tinkering with it. Let's help 3rd party developers port their work to 3.1 rather than planning 3.1's obsolescence. I believe it's at the other 'end for stick' of development process and doesn't hurt 3.1 at all.
Actually, adding too many new features post 3.1 *could* hurt 3.1 -- it could slow adoption because people might decide to wait for 3.2 which they expect to be even better. Plus the implementation of 3.2 features uses up energy that would be better spent elsewhere (the Python community has a chronic shortage of hands to help with menial task like porting 3rd party code to 3.1).
Another argument against new features is that the people who have the hardest time moving to 3.1 are those who are most bothered by change in general. If they view the language as "moving too fast" they might decide to move to a language that moves more slowly, or just stick with Python 2.4, which is nearly as bad.
A more cynical view (the like of which I've heard expressed about Perl 6) would be that python-ideas is where we keep those folks occupied who love to argue about new features but are unlikely to contribute anything... :-)
Or it's where the bikeshedding gets done; if an idea makes out of python-ideas then any critic of the new feature can be pointed to the relevant thread and told "already discussed, see!". :-)