[Python-ideas] New pattern-matching library (was: str.split with multiple individual split characters)

[Guido van Rossum]

On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 4:23 PM, geremy condra <debatem1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Well, you've noticed yourself how many times the same ideas and
> questions show up on python-ideas, and how often people think they're
> the first ones to come up with it. You've also noted that there are
> more productive problems that people interested in contributing could
> solve. ISTM that there may be an opportunity to kill two birds with
> one stone in that.
>
> Specifically, I'd suggest starting by putting together a wishlist and
> a do-not-want-list from some of the core devs and putting it in a
> prominent place on python.org. That should be fairly easy, and if it
> doesn't seem to be getting the amount of traffic that it would need to
> succeed there are a number of good ways to tie it in to other venues-
> adding tickets to the bug tracker, putting it in a newsletter, having
> this list spit back an email mentioning it whenever someone starts a
> new thread, mentioning it on slashdot, etc. It might also be a good
> way to take advantage of the sprints board, by specifically asking
> groups that have done successful sprints in the past to look at these
> ideas and see if they can come up with good ways to solve them. None
> of that requires a huge outlay of cash or resources.
>
> If this was successful, it might be a good idea to look at providing
> some in-Python support for those working on the wishlist items. With
> the hg transition already underway it seems like this should be fairly
> easy- just create an hg repo for the project in question and link it
> to a page on PyPI. Depending on the size of the project, amount of
> interest, timescale, and stage of maturity development discussion
> could take place either on the wiki, here, stdlib-sig, in their own
> google group, etc. Again, nothing requiring substantial outlay or
> time. The only investment required would be the effort of marketing
> the list as a whole.
>
> From there, it would just be a question of what direction to take. I
> can envision a lot of projects like this or Raymond Hettinger's idea
> for a stats module eventually seeing inclusion, but there are also a
> lot of possible tools where maintaining a relationship similar to the
> Apache Foundation and its projects might be for the best.
>
> I suspect it goes without saying, but I'd be happy to help out with
> this, and especially with PyCon coming up its a good time to put many
> eyes on problems like these.

Okay, I get it now. I don't know how many core developers are actually
following python-ideas. If you are serious about putting time into
this yourself, maybe the best thing you could do would be to start a
draft for such a document, put it in the Wiki (with some kind of
"draft" or "tentative" disclaimer) and post it to python-dev (as well
as here) to get the core devs' attention.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)