James, Ned, and everyone else, (I'm intentionally leaving the subject line untouched, but since James' message was sent to the list, I'm replying to the list.) In another thread, you (James) asked for ways to not feel like such a n00b, and you attempted (with mixed success) to start a discussion about improving the quality of communication here. So in the spirit of constructive criticism so that you and others can learn from experience and communicate better: (1) Taking the group discussion off-list should be done rarely, and usually only for personal messages that shouldn't be shared publically, or by mutual agreement for off-topic discussions. I can't see Ned's original comment in either my inbox, or at the archives, so it seems that he took the discussion off-list. I don't know why. It doesn't strike me as either personal or off-topic, so taking it off-list seems to be both unnecessary and a little rude to the rest of the group -- why were the rest of us excluded? But since Ned apparently intended to take it off-list, it is only polite to respect that your reply. (2) The long-standing tradition is to put "OFFLIST" at the *start* of the subject line, not the end where it is easy to overlook. To make it even more clear, we should explicitly state that the message is off-list at the top of the message. (Especially if you intend the message to be confidential.) (3) In the thread about improving communication, I mentioned that the easier it is to make comments, the more likely it is for people to make poor-quality comments. In my experience, posting from a phone is one of those tools that encourages poor-quality comments. It is each person's responsibility to either use a better communication tool (better does not necessarily mean more convenient) or to manage their own use of the tool better. I've seen too many people blame their tools for their own repeated mistakes: "I can't help it, it's my phone, it makes it too hard to do the right thing." Who is the master, them or their phone? We're all only human and therefore make mistakes, but we ought to own them when we do, and learn from them, not fob responsibility off to the tools we choose to use. (4) Speaking of poor-quality comments, you said "Python’s decline is in not growing." Do you have evidence that Python is "not growing" or did you just make that up? On Sun, Feb 03, 2019 at 12:34:02PM -0500, James Lu wrote:

Python’s decline is in not growing.

Sent from my iPhone

-- Steven

On 2/3/19 6:01 PM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:

(1) Taking the group discussion off-list should be done rarely, and usually only for personal messages that shouldn't be shared publically, or by mutual agreement for off-topic discussions.

I can't see Ned's original comment in either my inbox, or at the archives, so it seems that he took the discussion off-list. I don't know why. It doesn't strike me as either personal or off-topic, so taking it off-list seems to be both unnecessary and a little rude to the rest of the group -- why were the rest of us excluded?

But since Ned apparently intended to take it off-list, it is only polite to respect that your reply.

(2) The long-standing tradition is to put "OFFLIST" at the *start* of the subject line, not the end where it is easy to overlook.

To make it even more clear, we should explicitly state that the message is off-list at the top of the message.

(Especially if you intend the message to be confidential.)

I replied to James privately because I felt that the question of "Python's decline," and James' reasons for believing it to be so, were not on-topic for a list about suggestions for improving Python.  It also seemed to me that it could easily devolve into an unproductive discussion for such a large group.  But, it was probably also of interest to the group, many of whom were probably wondering the same things I was, so I can see how it could have stayed in the list (where it now is.) It also seemed to me to be a topic which could easily result in James feeling at a disadvantage, being on the other side of a subjective debate from the bulk of the group. I had hoped to discuss it with him in a setting that was less likely to get heated. I didn't mean to be rude to anyone. --Ned.

This is getting pretty off toipic, but I want to point out hat as a rule, Python has been critisised more for having too MUCH cnage than too little over the last few years: The py2 -> 3 transition Adding "yet another" formatting option (f-strings) Adding := The async stuff Granted, these are bigger deals than changing the spelling of stdlib class, but the point is that people want consistency as much (or more) as new features. And changing something like the spelling of datetime buys us exactly nothing in terms of expressiveness, etc. Finally, what the heck is wrong with datetime.now ? making it a classmethod keeps everything in one namespace, so you can reasonably do: from datetime import datetime, timedelta and be done with it. -CHB On Sun, Feb 3, 2019 at 9:34 AM James Lu wrote:

Python’s decline is in not growing.

Sent from my iPhone

On Feb 3, 2019, at 11:20 AM, Ned Batchelder wrote:

James, you say below, "This kind of readability issue, datetime.now, is an example of what’s contributing to Python’s decline."

Do you have any evidence of Python's decline? Lots of metrics (albeit simplistic ones) point to Python growing in popularity:

- https://www.techrepublic.com/article/fastest-growing-programming-language-py... - https://www.netguru.com/blog/why-python-is-growing-so-quickly-future-trends - https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/07/26/python-is-becoming-the-w...

Are there indicators we are missing?

--Ned. On 2/2/19 11:56 PM, James Lu wrote:

Sent from my iPhone

On Feb 2, 2019, at 3:41 AM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:

On Sat, Feb 02, 2019 at 12:06:47AM +0100, Anders Hovmöller wrote:

- the status quo means "no change", so there is no hassle there;

Not quite true. There is a constant hassle of "do I need to write datetime.datetime.now() or datetime.now()?"

My point was that there is no hassle from *making a change* if you don't actually make a change. (There may, or may not, be other, unrelated hassles.)

Besides, I'm not seeing that this is any worse than any other import. Do I call spam.Eggs.make() or Eggs.make()? If you don't remember what you imported, the names don't make much difference.

I accept that datetime.datetime reads a bit funny and is a bit annoying. If we had the keys to the time machine and could go back a decade to version 3.0, or even further back to 1.5 or whenever the datetime module was first created, it would be nice to change it so that the class was DateTime. But changing it *now* is not free, it has real, serious costs which are probably greater than the benefit gained.

Why can’t we put “now” as a property of the module itself, reccomend that, and formally deprecate but never actually remove datetime.datetime.now?

I solved this at work by changing all imports to follow the "from datetime import datetime" pattern and hard banning the other statically in CI. But before that people suffered for years.

Oh how they must have suffered *wink*

I'm surprised that you don't do this:

from datetime import datetime as DateTime

I have a colleague who likes to point that the future is longer than the past. It's important to keep that perspective.

Actually, no, on average, the projected lifespan of technologies, companies and cultural memes is about the same as their current age. It might last less, or it might last more, but the statistical expectation is about the same as the current age. So on average, "the future" is about the same as "the past".

Python has been around not quite 30 years now, so we can expect that it will probably last another 30 years. But chances are not good that it will be around in 300 years.

A big reason why projects last as long as you say they last is that the maintainers get un-ambitious, they get used to relaxing in the language they know so well, they are no longer keen on change.

This kind of readability issue, datetime.now, is an example of what’s contributing to Python’s decline.

Bottom line: if someone submits a PR for this, will anyone merge it?

-- Steve _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing listPython-ideas@python.orghttps://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/

_______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing listPython-ideas@python.orghttps://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/

_______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/

-- Christopher Barker, PhD Python Language Consulting - Teaching - Scientific Software Development - Desktop GUI and Web Development - wxPython, numpy, scipy, Cython

I shouldn't let it bother me, but that "Sent from my iPhone" cruft really gets under my skin. -- Carl Smith carl.input@gmail.com On Mon, 4 Feb 2019 at 11:17, Paul Moore wrote:

On Mon, 4 Feb 2019 at 05:36, Christopher Barker wrote:

...

This is getting pretty off toipic, but I want to point out hat as a

rule, Python has been critisised more for having too MUCH cnage than too little over the last few years: [...]

...

Finally, what the heck is wrong with datetime.now ?

Surely what's wrong is the fact that it adds another item to the list of changes that people will complain is "too much"? The conservatism in Python's development is not a result of the core devs being change averse, or because of a policy of blocking change. Rather it's because *the user community* reacts so strongly when we change things, so that we feel that stability is what our users want, and try to achieve that while still balancing the need for the language to grow and develop.

In a list like this, which represents only a tiny fraction of Python's user community, it's easy to misjudge the appetite Python's users have for change, because this is a self-selecting group of people who are interested in change. That's why the pushback on *any* proposal made here is to ask what benefits it gives, and why in the absence of good arguments for a change, "the status quo wins".

Paul

PS Personally, I'd love to add a lot of the ideas discussed in this list (although I'm "meh" about datetime.now, it's at best a minor annoyance). But with my "python developer" hat on I have to look beyond that and try to help proposers develop a good case for their suggestions (if indeed they do have sufficient merit). Just saying "yay, that sounds cool" doesn't do that, even if it's my personal instinct. _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/