[Python-Dev] vox populii illiterati

[M.-A. Lemburg]

Guido van Rossum wrote:
>>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 (:->)
> 
> 
> Part of my "cunning plan" is to show that indeed this doesn't work.
> I'm hoping you will forgive me this once-only Macchiavellian move. :-)
> 
> 
>>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.
> 
> 
> I admit I've lost some of my patience.  Showing that there is immense
> resistance to if-then-else expressions (even if there is also a lot of
> pressure to add them) would make it easier in the future to explain
> why they aren't there.

Good plan :-)

Except maybe one nit: some of us here in python-dev don't read
c.l.p, so their vote wouldn't get taken into account. Even though
you didn't want this to be discussed here, I hope you don't mind
posting my -1 here.

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
eGenix.com

Professional Python Software directly from the Source  (#1, Feb 09 2003)
 >>> Python/Zope Products & Consulting ...         http://www.egenix.com/
 >>> mxODBC, mxDateTime, mxTextTools ...        http://python.egenix.com/
________________________________________________________________________
Python UK 2003, Oxford:                                     51 days left
EuroPython 2003, Charleroi, Belgium:                       135 days left