ternary operator vote

[Gareth McCaughan]

Andrew Koenig wrote:
>  I would like to suggest that whenever there is a vote on PEP308, it be
>  conducted as an approval vote: List all of the alternatives, allow
>  people to vote for as many alternatives as they like, and count the
>  votes.

I strongly agree that something very like approval voting is
the way to go. However, I think pure approval voting isn't quite
right here. After all, everyone who's using Python right now
already regards the language we have as *acceptable*...

I propose, instead, that each person's vote should assign to
each option one of three scores: "Better", "Worse", "No change",
describing what they think of that option relative to how Python
is now. Then throw away anything that has fewer + and more -
than something else, and hand the remaining counts to Guido.
It can't take him long to decide whether he'd prefer +50=50-10
or +60=10-40 or +20=90-0.

One advantage of this last step is that, by leaving the exact
handling of the votes a little fuzzy, it's harder for any form
of tactical voting to be clearly useful, so the voting will be
more honest. :-)

In any case, just about any approval-like scheme has the advantage
that it coalesces the two phases of Aahz's proposal into one without
throwing away information.

-- 
Gareth McCaughan  Gareth.McCaughan at pobox.com
.sig under construc