[Python-ideas] A tuple of various Python suggestions

[Keith Curtis]

Hi again all,

Thanks for the replies.

I don't have a studied opinion of what new methods should be added to
functools, I mostly brought it up because it won't create an
incompatible change and things like that should be much easier to do.
Functools is one of the few remaining places in the core runtime where
it seems what is provided is meant to be a sample or flavor, and not
used on a daily basis without group-by, merge-sort, frequencies, pipe,
take / drop, etc.

I agree that more companies paying for Python support would be a great
thing, but most often companies buy support at a different level of
granularity: for example, RHEL where they get it for an entire OS, or
hiring Django people to build and maintain a website. I wouldn't count
on commercial redistributors of Python as ever being a big source of
resources to fix the thousands of random bugs. The vast majority of
people use the standard runtime.

I realize that volunteers work on their own time and choice of tasks,
but you've got quite a large community, and by periodically reporting
on the bug count and having a goal to resolve old ones eventually, you
will even find problem areas no one is talking about. Sometimes the
issue isn't resources, but grit, focus, pride, etc.

If you never weighed yourself, at looked at yourself in the mirror,
you'd get heavier than you realized. You are mostly volunteers, but
you can try to produce software as good as what paid professionals can
do.

Perhaps the bug list should be broken up into two categories: future
optional or incompatible features, and code that people can easily
agree are worth doing now. That way important holes don't get ignored
for years. People should be able to trust the standard runtime.

It didn't seem like WebAssembly would enable access to Numpy. It seems
doubtful it will be much adopted if it can't access the rich Python
runtime that might be installed.

Python is much cleaner than some of the alternatives, so you should
consider adoption as a humanitarian effort!

Regards,

-Keith