What is beauty?

[Douglas Alan]

Paul Prescod <paulp at ActiveState.com> writes:

> I claim that Python's success stems from Guido's ability to find
> sweet spots in the middle: not too hard, not too "dumbed down", not
> too performance-driven, not too slow.

Indeed this is Python's "Weltanschauung" and "beauty".  It is an
excellent work of industrial design: useful, ergonomic, attractive.
Despite what Alex seems to think, I have no desire to destroy this.

My desire for procedural macros is not to make Python needlessly more
complicated, but instead to grant more power to the people, rather
than keeping it bottled up, as Alex would prefer.  If you allow every
programmer to be an (embedded) language designer, seriously engaged in
the wonderful mental activity of creating notations that are elegant
and expressive, you allow all sorts of wonderful flowers to grow.
This is what Guy Steele suggests in "Growing a Language".  Sure, you
may allow some weeds to grow too, but this is a risk *I* am more than
willing to take in order to allow each programmer to create his own
beauty.

I feel that this can be done while keeping Python just as useful,
ergonomic, and attractive -- thus maintaining its Weltanschauung.
Various dialects of Lisp are existence proofs.  Perl is not a
counterexample contra Steve Lamb since (1) it doesn't have procedural
macros, and (2) it started off (IMHO) ugly to the core.

|>oug