Does Python really follow its philosophy of "Readability counts"?

Carl Banks pavlovevidence at gmail.com
Tue Jan 13 18:07:57 EST 2009


On Jan 13, 4:03 pm, Paul Rubin <http://phr...@NOSPAM.invalid> wrote:
> Bruno Desthuilliers <bdesth.quelquech... at free.quelquepart.fr> writes:
> > And that's the problem : what Paul suggests are not "improvements" but
> > radical design changes.
>
> Eh?  I think of them as moderate and incremental improvements, in a
> direction that Python is already moving in.

I've seen no evidence that any Python project is moving even remotely
toward data encapsulation.  That would be a drastic change.  Even if
it were only a minor change in the implementation (and it would not
be), it would be a major stroke in the Python community.  It would
basically cause a wholescale power shift from the user to the
implementor.  As a user it'd be like the difference between living in
a free democracy and a fascist dictatorship.


>  Radical would be
> something like a full-scale static type system.
>
> > I really wonder why peoples that seems to dislike one of the central
> > features of Python - it's dynamism - still use it (assuming of
> > course they are free to choose another language).
>
> I certainly don't think dynamism is central to Python. In what I see
> as well-developed Python programming style, it's something that is
> only rarely used in any important way.

You're in the minority, then.


> I'd spend much less time
> debugging if I got compiler warnings whenever I used dynamism without
> a suitable annotation.  The 1% of the time where I really want to use
> dynamism I don't see any problem with putting in an appropriate
> decorator, superclass, or whatever.

Well, I guess you are the sacrifical lamb so that everyone else can
take advantage of the dynamicism.


Carl Banks



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