Booleans, integer division, backwards compatibility; where is Python going?

[Paul Boddie]

Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote in message news:<3CAEFC4E.2778AC55 at python.org>...
> 
> About the change rate in general: it's hard to find the proper pace.
> Most new features are requested by users (even the division change!)

...which I eventually came to see as a good idea, although I
personally believe that the way it was announced caused unnecessary
panic. Postponing mandatory changes in semantics even to the release
after next, when the frequency of releases appears to be doubling over
time, might not have been enough to satisfy the most conservative
users.

[...]

> You clearly fall in the most conservative camp.  I just had a long
> exchange with someone who pleaded strongly for moving forward at a
> higher pace, breaking more existing code so that the perfect language
> can be obtained sooner.

Do such people actually do any real work with the language, though?
Wouldn't they be better served by a "big bang, super upgrade" some
time when all aspects of perfection are ready?

> I will have nothing of that, but I hope you understand my predicament: for
> every user like you who complains that things change too fast, there's
> someone with an equally strong desire for faster change.

For your amusement, perhaps you should insist that anyone voting (*)
for particular changes must demonstrate competence with the features
introduced by such changes (and prove that they're a real user of
them) before being allowed to ask for any more.

Let's say that Joe User threw his not inconsiderable charisma behind a
suggested and adopted new feature ("I fully support dictionary
generator comprehension microthreads and encourage you all to do so,
too!"); when subsequently asking for "transaction support in dynamic
class modification", one would ask him to prove that he actually uses
"dictionary generator comprehension microthreads", or whether he just
fancied having them in the language because they seemed like a good
idea at the time. Only after seeing that Joe User was sincere would
his latest support/advocacy/proposal be considered seriously.

(*) Of course, nothing gets decided by voting, but there's always a
lot of noise about new features. Perhaps this would reduce the noise
substantially, albeit at the cost of increasing the administration
ten-fold. ;-)

Anyway, I'm still using 2.0 for most things because Unicode was an
important feature that 2.0 provided. As for the other features
introduced in 2.0 and later, I can't say that I use any of them apart
from the += operator - I hardly ever even use the -= operator! I would
also guess that a reasonable number of people who use the language
still regard these newer features as advanced or magical, especially
those people who learned the language in the pre-1.6 days.

As far as the 2.2 features are concerned, they seem to have a
reputation in certain circles as being badly-defined, immature and
"best steered clear of until later". That's a shame, since some of
them are really very interesting (although the intersection of
"interesting" and "essential" is obviously measured in different ways
by different people), but I can understand (and support) the intention
of focusing on stability for 2.3.

Paul