[Python-ideas] A bit meta
Steven D'Aprano
steve at pearwood.info
Fri Jan 29 23:10:02 EST 2016
On Fri, Jan 29, 2016 at 05:56:57PM +0000, Brett Cannon wrote:
> A better fit would be something like https://www.uservoice.com/ if people
> wanted a focused "vote on ideas" solution,
I don't think treating language design as a participatory democracy
would be a good idea, even if it were practical. (How could you get all
Python users to vote? Do casual users who only use Python occasionally
get fractional votes?) If it were, Python would probably look and behave
a lot more like PHP.
And even representative democracy has practical problems. (Who speaks
for the users of numpy? Sys admins? Teachers?)
I'm 100% in favour of community participation and would like to
encourage people to participate and be heard, but I don't think we
should have any illusions about the fundamentally non-democratic nature
of language design. Nor do I think that's necessarily a bad thing. Not
everything needs to be decided by voting.
I think it is far more honest to admit that language design is always
going to be an authoritarian process where a small elite, possibly even
a single person, decides what makes it into the language and what
doesn't, than to try to claim democratic legitimcy via voting that
cannot possibly be representative.
> or something like
> https://www.discourse.org/ for a more modern forum platform that has the
> concept of likes for a thread.
Ah, "like" buttons. The way to feel good about yourself for
participating without actually participating :-)
Well, I suppose it's a bit less disruptive than having hordes of
"Me too!!!1!" posts.
--
Steve
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