language growth

Greg Weeks weeks at vitus.scs.agilent.com
Sun Sep 9 21:23:35 EDT 2001


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.

So, it seems to me that at some point it is desirable to reject good ideas.
The bar needs to be raised to allow only great ideas, and then at some
later point to allow only insanely great ideas.  At that point the language
will change glacially, if at all.

If that is correct, how do you raise the bar?  How do you decide that an
idea that would have been desirable five years ago is no longer good enough
for inclusion?  How do you decide how big/complex a language should be?

I don't know, but this seems relevant to Python.  (And I need to get a
small number of potentially puerile and undergraduate postings out of my
system.)

Regards,
Greg



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