PEP0238 lament

[James Logajan]

Tim Peters wrote:
> Guido hears all the
> complaints, and he's become convinced that this is a genuine and serious
> flaw in the language:  the current rules are *unusable* for too many people
> too often.  If you're not one of them, congratulations <wink>.  I'm not
> either -- I never get burned by this.  But I see plenty of people who are,
> and they're neither stupid nor careless; it's a common blind spot, so it
> doesn't really matter that it's not one I (or you) suffer.

Well, having learned one set of expectations, I can say that I WILL suffer
some pain if this is changed. And it isn't a case of an expectation carried
over from another language!

Speaking of patterns, it unfortunately appears that Guido has a strong
tendency to take the existing user base for granted, since he continues to
keep the door open to code-breaking changes. There is only so much insult
("well, what you were doing was bad style anyway," or "you shouldn't have
written code that depends on integer division(!)") and injury (the more
Python you've written, the more likely something you wrote wont work with
the latest version and will need to spend hours reviewing,
just-in-case-anyway) before one decides that it just isn't worth the pain.

I do not want to continue to write more Python and expose myself to further
risk of having it either become dependent on an un-maintained and minority
release (e.g. "sorry, you should have upgraded to 3.1 years ago; who writes
stuff on 2.1 these days anyway?") or having a growing body of code to
constantly shepherd along to insure it runs on the next release.

That is the pragmatics from my point of view. And it doesn't give a damn
what real or perceived "flaw" in the language is being addressed.