[Python-Dev] Why did Fredrik leave the party?

[Michael McLay]

On Tuesday 04 February 2003 03:57 pm, Guido van Rossum wrote:
> > these are trying times:
> >
> > http://online.effbot.org/2003_02_01_archive.htm#python-dev
>
> What a shame.
>
> Fredrik has been absent in spirit for a long time.  When was the last
> time he participated in any kind of technical discussion, blue-sky or
> other?  All we've heard from him recently were the occasional snide
> remark aimed at new visitors who violate the unspoken code of behavior
> here.  I haven't seen him fix any SRE bugs either, SF bugs assigned to
> him for ages notwithstanding.

It looks like Fredrik is drifting away from Python development because Python 
has been drifting away from the original small-is-beautiful design. The 
energy going into the thunks and Extended Function threads has me baffled. 
Will the marginal gain in new applications that will be enabled by these 
features exceed the marginal loss in new Python programmers due to the 
increased learning threshold?  The creep is slow, but it is happening. 
Generators are cool once you understand them, but they raise the bar for 
someone new to the language. The same is true for list comprehension. And the 
proposed syntax changes I've seen in these thrreads are ugly. Please don't 
turn Python into Perl.

I thought the focus of development was going to put more energy into improving 
the standard library. For instance, Zope often works with SQL databases and 
those databases often contain financial data. How well does Python support 
this numerical requirement? According to IBM Technical Report TR03.413 [1], 
the numeric column breakdown by data type is:

   Type    Columns  percent     
 Decimal    251038   55.0    
 SmallInt   120464   26.4    
 Integer    78842    17.3    
 Float      6180     1.4

The Decimal type is the overwhelming winner because the Decimal type is 
required for financial calculations. This is a huge and important IT market 
segment. I submitted a patch that added a native fixed type to Python using 
Tim Peter's FixedPoint module, but it was rejected because I added syntax 
support for the new type. Please at least add Tim's FixedPoint module to the 
2.3 release. (The class should probably be renamed to something shorter like 
fpoint or fixed when it is added to the standard library.) 

[1] http://www2.hursley.ibm.com/decimal/decifaq1.html#dbstats