If you want X, you know where to find it (was Re: do...until wisdom needed...)

[Paul Prescod]

Steve Lamb wrote:
> 
> On 19 Apr 2001 17:58:40 -0400, Douglas Alan <nessus at mit.edu> wrote:
> >My dictionaries disagree with your dictionary.  My Webster says that
> >abuse "stresses harshness and unfairness of verbal attack".  It is the
> >*attack* that must be "harsh" for words to be "abusive" -- the words
> >themselves do not need to be harsh.
> 
>     Well, gee, Alex hasn't been harsh in my book.  I mean, you're 
> the one who made the comment, and I'm paraphrasing here....  $#%$ 
> you!  You know, fsck you in unix terms.  I think that given the 
> two labels and the two people in the thread you're the abusive one.

I'm having a hard time seeing how this has anything to do with Python!

Douglas came in with an idea. Arguably a bad idea. I guess the perceived
badness of Douglas' idea annoyed Alex and Steve so much that they
started to take it personally and attack Douglas personally.

Douglas has no capacity to make the changes he desires without
widespread support from the Python community in general and Guido in
particular. So I would encourage everyone to just relax and breathe
deeply. Unless Douglas has more ambition than 90% of the rest of us,
he'll sit down to write a PEP and an implementation, get distracted by a
project with a higher bang-for-buck ratio and the idea will die. If, on
the other hand, he sees it through then we have something concrete to
argue about on technical terms instead of debating abstractions. Maybe
Guido would say "no" once and for all and the topic could be put to rest
forever.

Or maybe there is a middle ground that would give everyone enough of
what they need to be happy. For instance a formal mechanism for source
filters might make sense. 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. I'm not trying
to mediate the technical differences here but make the point that you
would never find the sweet spot by going at each other's throats. 

This makes it very difficult to figure out the answer to Python
technical issues through an appeal to first principles. So let's see a
PEP, play with it a little and then debate based on technical merits.
And if Douglas doesn't feel like writing a PEP then that's okay too. He
proposed an idea. Some people didn't like it. Life goes on.

the-central-design-principle-is-no-central-design-principle'ly yrs
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