[Python-ideas] History on proposals for Macros?

[Guido van Rossum]

On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 9:26 PM, Matthew Rocklin <mrocklin at gmail.com> wrote:

> Is something stopping you from exploring this? Do you have specific ideas
>> on how to improve on macropy?
>>
>
> Macropy is great but it requires an import-hook.  Many scientific users
> work interactively.
>
>
>> It sounds almost as if you would like to implement this but you want some
>> kind of promise ahead of time that your work will be incorporated into the
>> language. But that's just not how it works. When you want to explore a big
>> idea like this, at some point you have to be willing to take the risk of
>> writing code without a guaranteed pay off. Haoyi didn't ask for macropy to
>> be incorporated into Python -- in fact he was surprised at the amount of
>> uptake it got.
>>
>
> The hard problem isn't building macros, it's deciding whether or not
> macros are good for Python.  I'm trying to start a discussion.  If this
> isn't the right place for that then I apologize.
>

This is the right place, and we're now at the point where it's your job to
either show a concrete design spec that can actually be implemented, and
have its tires kicked, or just go off and build something. In the latter
case you'll probably learn about some practical issues that nobody might
have thought of yet.


> You've received quite a bit of feedback (and, may I say, push back :-)
>> from a small number of python-ideas veterans -- you can take this or leave
>> it, but at this point I think you've gotten about as much mileage out of
>> the list as can be expected.
>>
>
> My apologies.  I didn't realize that I was misusing this list.  I also
> didn't realize that I was receiving push-back, the comments here seemed
> friendly and encouraging.
>

You weren't misusing the list. Maybe (based on your next message) you
weren't reading it though. :-)


> Last year at SciPy the message I heard was "If you want to convince the
> core team then come to python-ideas armed with motivating use cases."  Here
> I am :)
>
> Anyway, if there isn't any interest then I'll leave off.  Thank you all
> for your time,
>

I think you misunderstand. There's interest but there are also real
concerns. I really do think that an implementation (if, as you say, that
isn't the hard part) would be very helpful to judge whether it is a
desirable feature. (Maybe you discover you can do it in a way that can be
distributed via PYPI -- "pip install macros".)

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
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