PEP scepticism

[Guido van Rossum]

Robin Becker <robin at jessikat.fsnet.co.uk> writes:

> I think you express my position rather well. I don't believe that the
> users' needs are changing so fast,  rather I think that the user base
> itself is changing and with the new users come new needs and perhaps
> more and very different needs.

Bingo!

> On the other hand I think the target user base should be a reasonable
> one. I don't think python should be aimed at pre-schoolers. If there is
> a target set who and what are they? 

We're aiming at people with a high school education, actually.  Folks
whose main intuition about numbers and arithmetic is based on digital
calculators.

> I think that the development process itself is a bit awry as there are
> now more than 250 documents on requirements/changes etc and as you say
> getting to grips with the totality of the changes is hard.
> 
> For 250 documents to exist there have to be too many cooks for smooth
> development as many organisational studies suggest that best team sizes
> are between 3 and 7.

Don't jump to conclusions too fast!  PEPs aren't numbered
consecutively.  There are only about 75 PEPs.  Roughly half of those
are historical documents (already implemented or rejected), some are
meta-documents (numbers below 100).  The number under consideration is
theoretically about 25; in practice, half of those will never make it.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)