[meta-sig] Re: [Types-sig] The Types-SIG is comatose. Let's retire it.

[Martijn Faassen]

Guido van Rossum wrote:
> 
> It's time for the twice yearly ritual of looking for comatose SIGs.
> >From the archives, it looks like the types-sig is the only dud amongst
> the crowd: all other SIGs are doing well (some are doing *extremely*
> well, like the doc-sig and the matrix-sig).
> 
> The types-sig hasn't had traffic since August (4 messages) and in all
> of 1999 it has only has 12 messages.
> 
> Type-sig, what do you have to say for yourself?

Oddly enough, there has been quite some discussion on types on
comp.lang.python since then. John Skaller's viper discussions and the
discussions on Ruby are an example. I agree with others that the problem
of the types-SIG is a lack of focus of discussion (too many different
topics all having to do somewhat with types), and nobody doing the brunt
of the work. John Skaller does appear to be doing lots of work on types
in Python, but he seems to prefer working alone with his source. It's
not as if there's no interest for type issues in the Python community;
far from that. It just seems that there's nobody who has enough
time/knowledge to work on them.

Having studied the Zope sources I'm becoming painfully aware for the
need of something like interfaces. Zope's source would really be far
more understandable if it were rewritten with interfaces, I think. I
understand Jim Fulton's motivation concerning interfaces far better
since my foray into those sources.

I'm still interested in static types as well, mostly in the interests of
compilation. It's ridiculous to split a SIG that doesn't talk, of
course, but perhaps better would be to have a 'compiler-SIG' and an
'interfaces-SIG'. I'd expect the interface-SIG to come with results far
more quickly than the compiler-SIG.

Regards,

Martijn