PEP scepticism

Robin Becker robin at jessikat.fsnet.co.uk
Fri Jul 6 11:41:43 EDT 2001


In article <cpith6l3ip.fsf at cj20424-a.reston1.va.home.com>, Guido van
Rossum <guido at python.org> writes
....
>Well duh!
>
>If we left the design of programming languages to the *average*
>programmer, the field would never make progress.  Please give us
>language designers some credit.  We're programmers and we know what
>programmers need!
>
>This whole thread has disappointed me.
>
...
well, all known languages have been produced by people/bees/bacteria etc
and I know of no goodness criterion for languages except perhaps some
notions of expressivity and the like. There are some rather abstract and
little used notions of parseability, but these have no relevance on
whether a language actually gets used.

No matter that the vast majority of languages aren't understandable by
humans, for any language there will be a whole (infinite) family of
utilities which show that language to be optimal.

Presumably the designers/creators of P*** are also making similar
assertions and are as equally right/wrong.

Dictators often assume they know best, but observation shows them to be
uniformly wrong.
-- 
Robin Becker



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