[Python-Dev] vox populii illiterati

[Tim Peters]

[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'd like to put a different light on it:  this is more of a vote taken
within a single-parent family, where the kids disagree and the parent
doesn't favor any particular outcome, but is weary of the bickering.  In
that sense it's like the last time Guido asked for a vote:  do people want
imaginary literals to be spelled with "i" or "j"?  He didn't care which won,
but was very keen to get the whining out of his inbox.

This one is more complicated, because the pros and cons on both sides are
subtler.  But after more than a decade of listening to this debate, neither
side makes a compelling case in Guido's eyes, and on balance he thinks
Python will be fine either way (when he said he was neither in favor of nor
opposed to the PEP, he meant it).

> 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.

Yup, and I expect anyone who has written a program with a user other than
themself <wink> has experienced this to some degree too.

> 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.

In this case, the issue has been studied by Guido for 10+ years off and on,
but no overall winner, based on his inscrutable design criteria(*), has
become apparent.

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

Don't worry:  Guido may let us decide whether we want Coke or Pepsi from
time to time, but we'll still go to bed when he tells us to <wink>.


(*) By my design criteria, I want the ternary functionality, but find all
spellings proposed to date unattractive.  I'm not sure how much that
channels Guido's feelings about it.  I believe he wants the functionality
less than I do, but finds the proposed spelling more attractive than I do
("less repulsive" may be more accurate).  Either way, it's a wash.