[Python-ideas] [Python-Dev] Persistent Python - a la Smalltalk

[Glyph Lefkowitz]

On Sep 19, 2011, at 3:12 AM, Godson Gera wrote:

> On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 12:03 AM, Glyph Lefkowitz <glyph at twistedmatrix.com> wrote:
> 
> Actually, the Twisted developers also found this to be a terrible idea, and doesn't really do it any more.  I definitely understand the appeal of such a system, but it has far too many problems to work well in Python, and even in Smalltalk (which was built from the start to work like this) it was the source of a number of long-term systematic problems with the ecosystem.
> 
> I willfully leftout the detail that Twisted is not doing it any more  :) . So that the person who asked this won't get discouraged, if he has time and energy to pursue it and make some thing new, I thought all the Python community may have another battery called persistance included.

Yes, and I put it in in the hopes that they are discouraged :-).  There's a staggering number of really good ideas out there for people to work on; why get stuck re-hashing the bad ones?

Of course, maybe they've got a really fantastic idea about how a persistent python might work, but they'll have to face more obstacles than this one comment in order to get it done, so it shouldn't make that much of a difference.  I think it's my responsibility, as someone who has tried this idea, to make sure that others attempting it know that it's problematic.  As Clay Shirky put it:

"... learning from experience is the worst possible way to learn something. Learning from experience is one up from remembering. That's not great. The best way to learn something is when someone else figures it out and tells you: 'Don't go in that swamp. There are alligators in there.'"

So, trust me: there are alligators in that pickle.

-glyph
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