[Python-Dev] Re: PEP 318: Decorators last before colon

[Paul Prescod]

Greg Ewing wrote:

> "Phillip J. Eby" <pje at telecommunity.com>:
> 
> 
>>There are different kinds of aesthetics.  Guido's proposal has grown on me 
>>from a *visual* aesthetics point of view.  After I worked with it a little 
>>bit, I realized it really is much prettier than decorators-before-colon.
> 
> Your tastes must be different from mine, then, because
> it doesn't strike me as any prettier visually, either.

What people find readable depends mostly on what they are used to. The 
reason Python is "so readable" on first read is because it rips off so 
much syntax directly from C, the language that is the ancestor for all 
of the other languages people use today.

C doesn't have function decorators so people don't have expectations for 
them. But they will when they start coming over from C# and Java 1.5 in 
two or three years. One virtue of Guido's proposal is that it is 
basically what C# does. Java uses a pretty different syntax but it is 
also a prefix syntax. If Python uses a postfix syntax it will probably 
be alone in making that choice.

I'm not saying that Python has to do what the other languages do because 
they do it, but all else equal, being familiar is better than being 
idiosyncratic (i.e. different for no good reason). So I would rank "like 
C# and Java" higher than "fits my personal aesthetics in early 2004" 
because aesthetics are likely to drift towards C# and Java over time.

  Paul Prescod