[Python-Dev] User's complaints

[Michael Hudson]

"A.M. Kuchling" <amk at amk.ca> writes:

> On Mon, Jul 10, 2006 at 05:13:53PM +0200, Armin Rigo wrote:
>> didn't draw much applause.  It certainly gave me the impression that
>> many changes in Python are advocated and welcomed by only a small
>> fraction of users.
>
> The benefits of changes are usually clear, but I don't think the costs
> of changes are fully assessed.  python-dev considers the cost of
> changes to CPython's implementation, but I don't think the cost
> changes to Jython, IronPython, or PyPy are taken into account here.

I don't want to attempt to speak for Armin, but I don't think that was
quite the point he was trying to make.  The cost of implementation
isn't really that high -- most of the changes from 2.3 to 2.4 were
implemented for PyPy in about a week and we have implementations of
most of the 2.5 features already, and you can also consider the
decorators discussion where each of the proposed syntaxes had solid
tested implementations.

At least from my POV, the cost of bad design, whether through simple
lack of sufficient thought or aggregation of features into cruft, is
much much higher.

> PyPy probably has enough representatives here who would squawk if
> something was difficult, but I don't think Jython or IronPython do.

People implementing Python should accept the fact that Python is a
changing language, IMHO.

> I think if we assessed those costs fully, the bar for changes to the
> language would be a good deal higher.

I think if you assessed these other costs fully, the bar would be
higher still.

Cheers,
mwh

-- 
  This is the fixed point problem again; since all some implementors
  do is implement the compiler and libraries for compiler writing, the
  language becomes good at writing compilers and not much else!
                                 -- Brian Rogoff, comp.lang.functional