Inefficiency of __getattr__

[Alex Martelli]

"Albert Wagner" <alwagner at tcac.net> wrote in message
news:39DBDF08.137B5269 at tcac.net...
> Wasn't this whole static/dynamic thing beat to death here several months
> ago?  If another language does  things more to your liking, then use
> that other language.  If NO language does things to your liking, then
> write one that does. Most on this newgroup are here because for various
> reasons they like Python.  Also most have a diverse background of many
> languages.  This NG has grown by leaps and bounds the last year.  We
> don't need to waste bandwidth rehashing an old, old argument.

We don't need to waste it, but we do need to spend it (and keep
spending it for the foreseeable future).  It would be silly to
further encourage language fragmentation, as you're doing, by
suggesting that anybody who doesn't consider any existing language
absolutely perfect should write a new one; even as it is, far too
many languages are born anyway IMHO, far too much collective energy
gets wasted in redesigning and reimplementing.  I'd MUCH rather
encourage people who like a language, but don't consider it quite
perfect, to spend their time and energy contributing to that
language's development (which fully includes discussing the why's
and wherefore's of various design-choices currently active in the
language and ones that might be made in the future).

Such discussions are not a waste, since they encourage widespread
attention on such design-choices, what benefits and problems they
bring, how some of their strengths can be exploited and some of
their weaknesses worked around, etc, etc.  If so much bandwidth
was not being invested in such discussion, awareness of these issues
would be generally lower, and this would lower the effectiveness of
some of the programming we do -- even quite apart from the issue of
influencing the language's future development.  (I do wonder what
ever happened to the typing SIG, though:-).


Alex