Generating a random subsequence

[Justin Sheehy]

"Steve Holden" <sholden at holdenweb.com> writes:

> Fortunately or unfortunately this topic was exhausted over a year ago.

I know.  I was lamenting, not arguing.

> More briefly: you may well be right, but you are going to have to learn to
> live with it, and most people won't regard it as a wart.

I've already learned to live with it myself.

However, I have had a few different people come to me at work confused
by the results of this feature.  This is what keeps me convinced that
the implementation was wrong from the perspective of the principle of
least surprise.

I'm not one of the people that is opposed to adding new things to
Python.  Some of them (list comprehensions, for example) I am very
happy about.  However, when something new is added which looks obvious
and intuitive but produces surprising results, it detracts from one
of Python's biggest strengths.

-Justin