language growth

[Paul Boddie]

weeks at vitus.scs.agilent.com (Greg Weeks) wrote in message news:<1000085015.952637 at cswreg.cos.agilent.com>...
> I just happened to notice a PEP stating that a certain additional construct
> would be "a good idea".  I imagine that there are lots of good ideas out
> there, genuine and perhaps even significant language improvements.  But I'm
> move convinced of this: If every significant language improvement were
> added to the language, it wouldn't be an improvement at all.  All those
> good things would add up to a bad thing.  The optimal size for a language
> is not enormous.

I think that this was one of the points that people made before and,
increasingly, during the big division debate. Whilst the PEP process
is a good way of formalising language changes and the ideas which
support such changes, it can appear like a method of getting one's
"pet project" into the language provided that one can justify it
enough in writing.

That's not to say that this was the case with the division proposal,
nor that documentation is undesirable - far from it, in fact - but it
might be frustrating for some to see some previously discussed
construct, absent from Python, being actively debated when there are
so many other areas in which Python's position could improve.
Thankfully, there seems to be a fair amount of activity in areas which
have stagnated in the past; perhaps, any mass temptation to change the
language is now in decline and the creative energies of the community
at all levels are mostly focused in other, more worthy areas.

Paul