[Python-Dev] User's complaints

[Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven]

On 7/13/06, Neal Norwitz <nnorwitz at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 7/12/06, Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven <ashemedai at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thank you very much for your feedback.  It helps.

With apologies in advance if my own level of understanding is, of
course, lacking of advanced constructs.

> If it's pure python, why don't people just copy everything under
> site-packages after installing?  They could/should run compileall
> after that to recompile the .pyc files.  With 2.5 on 64-bit machines,
> C extension modules *must* be recompiled due to lots of internal
> changes.

I wasn't even aware of the compileall step, can you elaborate since
this is the first time I see it being mentioned.

> One thing you didn't mention that I've heard from time to time is the
> stdlib should be improved.  For example, cleaning up old modules.
> Though I'm not really sure everyone has the same thing in mind when it
> comes to improving the stdlib.

How do you envision cleaning up old modules?

> Do you think you could help with the doc?  How can we get people,
> especially tech writers, interested in improving the doc?  Most people
> agree it's important, but few make time to really improve the doc.
> We've talked about making it easier for people to contribute to the
> docs, perhaps adding something like a wiki/comments.  Do you think
> that would help?

Wiki/comments are useful, sure, the only problem is that if you have
to sift through every single page to spot a useful comment it is not
helping. I never liked PHP's comment system to take an example.
Personally, but that's just me of course, I prefer a periodic
evaluation of comments and reintegration of said comments into the
documentation itself.

I've been looking at Python's docstrings in the main codebase and that
use alone is inconsistent, some areas feature a lot of docstrings,
some have none. But with alone docstrings you will not cut it I think.

I hope to get around in the coming time to work up some documentation
changes/patches and submit these.


[if __name__ == "__main__":]
> I'm not sure I understand your point.  Can you provide more info about
> what you dislike/expect instead?

Not the above construct at least. :)
To me it just feels like a kludge, perhaps due to the fact that the
rest of Python just flows from your fingers when writing/programming.

Perhaps one could even get away with it in the form of:

def __main__():
    ...main program...

Some other complaints/wishes from a hard core pythonista:

- There's no support for real macros.
- Writable closures would be nice.
- Open classes would be nice.

-- 
Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven