Python from Wise Guy's Viewpoint

[Pascal Costanza]

Joachim Durchholz wrote:

> Multimethods, on the other hand, are indeed powerful, but they are also 
> dangerous.

Life is dangerous.

> Just like GOTO - you can use it to make code better, but 
> often enough it's making it worse.

How often?

> Multimethods are just a case where 
> problems disguise themselves as coding errors - looking at the 
> sophisticated user-definable machinery for selecting the right method 
> during multimethod dispatch, it seems like these problems indeed showed 
> up, and were "solved" by adding further baroqueness to the language. To 
> the point that reading the source code of a function will not reveal 
> what's actually happening, because some quirk in multimethod resolution 
> strategy may select entirely different subfunctions than those that the 
> reader would have expected.
>  From a software maintenance perspective, this is pure disaster.

Is this based on actual experience, or are you just guessing?

> In practice, most programmers aren't great, they are average. Assuming a 
> halfways sane distribution, 50% of all programmers are even /below/ 
> average - and their services are still very much in need.
> How should they get their work done?
> Educating them isn't an option - if that were a possibility, it would 
> have long been done.

No, because people are already educated under the assumption that they 
are not bright. This assumption is very deeply rooted in our society, 
but I don't see any evidence that it has actually improved anything. To 
the contrary, it seems to me that people stay "average" _because_ they 
are treated this way. IMHO it's very cynical to assume that other people 
are less bright than oneself.

Did it ever occur to you that learning a language designed for experts 
can make you a better programmer?


Pascal