do...until wisdom needed...

[Christopher A. Craig]

Douglas Alan <nessus at mit.edu> writes:

> What happened to giving programmers enough rope to hang themselves?
> What happened to the desire for flexibility and expressive power?

You can still get this, just not in Python.  If you want a long rope,
you still have Lisp, C, C++, and Perl.  One of the principles that
makes Python so popular is its simplicity.  Any reasonably skilled
programmer can learn every important part of the Python syntax in less
than a day.  Sure C++ is a more flexible language than Python.  But, I
have read the entire language reference for Python, it took a couple
hours; it would take me a couple hours to carry the C++ language
reference up to my 4th floor desk.  I have never seen a Python program
that I couldn't sit down and read with little effort; I rarely see a
Perl program that I can.

If you go adding macros to Python then you remove that simplicity.
You would make it so that any programmer can add arbitrary levels of
complexity to the syntax used in the program, and thus before reading
through code a programmer would have to read and understand the macros
used.  You can do this now by passing your program through m4 before
Python parsing it, but you wouldn't be programming in Python.  And
that really is the point.

-- 
Christopher A. Craig <com-nospam at ccraig.org>
"You could shoot Microsoft Office off the planet and this country would
 run better. You would see everyone standing around saying, 'I've got
 so much time now.' "  Scott McNealy (CEO of Sun)