PEP scepticism

[Martijn Faassen]

James Logajan <JamesL at lugoj.com> wrote:
> Bernhard Reiter wrote:
>> 
>> This a general warning against the second system syndrom in Python.
> [ Elided. ]

> Thank you, Bernhard. I agree with your unease.

I have the same unease. It would seem to me that the features that
most trouble people are new syntax or changes to syntax. Semantic
changes are strangely enough not seen as so troubling, as often 
it's an attempt to make the semantics more general (healing the type/class
split, for instance).

Perhaps it would be a good idea to consider a strategy to slow down
the syntactic changes by saying we can only have new ones every
other Python release (let's say the uneven ones, though no
parallel with Linux stable/development kernel is implied). The even releases
would focus on:

a) tweaking with the interpreter (making it faster, fixing bugs, also
   perhaps 'generalizing' semantics such as type/class and the number
   system)

b) *adding to the standard library*!

The latter does not appear to get a lot of focus in the PEPs, though
it may be my selective reading that does it. But a clear focus on
the standard library by the core developers couldn't be bad, right?

The even releases would have a moratorium on changes that would
involve changes to the language syntax, and any change that really
should require such a change (but we're submitting the PEP anyway as
we want it so badly, and we'll just do a hackish application of the
current syntax instead. This is of course bad too).

What do people think about the general idea?

Regards,

Martijn
--
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No, WWW -- Could we be going in the right direction?