[Python-Dev] vox populii illiterati

[Paul F Dubois]

I very much appreciate Guido putting forward a PEP on if expressions, =
but I
must say the idea of letting c.l.p 'vote' on it is unwelcome. Voting =
only
makes sense when an electorate is educated enough to properly understand =
the
proposition and its consequences; the discussion so far makes clear that
that isn't true. Programming languages need to be designed, not
agglutinated. (Otherwise you get Perl and Fortran 2000 (:->)

I think it is fair to say that being the head designer of a language can
lead to frustration at times; I had to endure it on a much smaller scale =
and
it was very hard to keep patiently explaining how the features had to =
fit
together, and how they had to be both parseable and implementable and
learnable, and that not every little difficulty is worth a language =
feature.


In the cases of several of the features adopted recently, a quick =
inspection
has initially led me to believe that the feature was not interesting but
study showed that it was. I just don't think you can delegate this kind =
of
study to a group that is mostly inexperienced even at programming much =
less
language design.=20

I want my BDFL. As Davy Crockett said, "Be sure you're right, then go
ahead."

Paul Dubois