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

geremy condra debatem1 at gmail.com
Mon Oct 26 23:47:37 CET 2009


On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 6:05 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> geremy condra wrote:
>> On Sun, Oct 25, 2009 at 8:51 PM, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
>>
>> <snip>
>>
>>> Also to stop the pointless discussions about anonymous blocks (though
>>> that may have been naive :-).
>>>
>>> --
>>> --Guido van Rossum
>>
>> Tell everybody that proposes it to show you the code. 99% of them will
>> STFU, and it's probably worth a little bit of time to see what the other
>> 1% come up with, even if its never going to get in. Worst case scenario,
>> you've spared yourself the headache of dealing with people who can't
>> (or won't) help you implement what they so urgently desire. Best case
>> scenario, maybe you even get a great feature out of it.
>
> There's no point telling people to produce code for a design that isn't
> acceptable in the first place. No anonymous block proposal has ever even
> made it past the first hurdle of being better in concept than a named
> function (which do have their downsides, but those have always been
> looked minor when compared to the downsides of the proposed additions).
>
> Cheers,
> Nick.

The point is that almost none of them will do it, and if somebody is
so determined that they'll actually jump through all these hoops to
get the feature, maybe it really *is* needed for something they're
doing. In any event, by the time they've done that they deserve to
be taken more seriously than the person just randomly jawing off.
Plus, not all features are as pointless as multiline lambda, but
almost all proposals for language change are being sidelined by
the moratorium. We should provide a facility for those ideas to be
identified and developed (by third parties) during the moratorium
so that we have time for a careful and thorough review- in effect
giving ourselves a solid one to two year head start on any future
language changes. I might even go so far as to say that under this
model a kind of rolling moratorium might be a good idea- a
mandatory period of substantial length during which a change to
the core language has to be reviewed by the devs, the community,
and the other implementors for its viability and usefulness. But
that's probably something to be decided by higher-ups later on.

Geremy Condra



More information about the Python-ideas mailing list