[Python-ideas] Proposal: Moratorium on Python language changes

[Guido van Rossum]

On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 5:57 PM, geremy condra <debatem1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 8:31 PM, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
>> On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 5:15 PM, Jared Grubb <jared.grubb at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> It would be a shame to discourage new ideas just because we are not willing
>>> to implement them "now".
>>>
>>> I hope that any moratorium would not cut discussions of new ideas short,
>>> would not change the tone of python-ideas, and would not discourage writing
>>> PEP's for new language features (with the understanding that it will be a
>>> while before they actually get implemented).
>>
>> Actually one of my goals with the moratorium is to discourage
>> discussion of certain ideas that keep coming up forever and draining
>> the energy of the list.
>
> Personally, I think mandating that you bring working code to the table
> when proposing a language change would take the number of requests
> for, say, removing the GIL to pretty much nil.

Actually removing the GIL is not subject to the moratorium, and it
seems that some people *are* working on code.

>> Also, I certainly don't hope that when the
>> moratorium is lifted there are 20 language PEPs waiting for approval.
>> Python's evolution needs to slow down as the user community grows.
>
> Again, I doubt that very many of the people proposing some of these
> changes have either the technical skills to pull them off or the
> patience to maintain them for a year and a half while waiting for the
> moratorium to lift. My guess is that you'll have about 300 half-baked
> or just-started projects and only one or two good ones ready for PEP
> consideration. Over the period of time you're talking about, that
> doesn't seem -IMO- to be too much, too fast. Your mileage may
> certainly vary.

I hope to discourage those 300 people to the point where there won't
be any half-baked or unbaked projects. Let them contribute to Perl 6.
:-)

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)