PEP0238 lament

[Stephen Horne]

On Mon, 23 Jul 2001 16:10:10 -0700, Paul Prescod
<paulp at ActiveState.com> wrote:

>This issue is constantly presented as some sort of dichotomy between
>"regular" programmers" and newbies. But really it is more of a 
>dichotomy between those originally trained on typed languages and 
>those on dynamically typed languages.
>
>The other languages in the Python category (Perl, Ruby, JavaScript, ...)

They aren't dynamically typed, they are essentially untyped. That is a
very different thing. And the reason Python users are Python users is
quite often because they hate the choices made by Perl, Javascript...

There's a marketing term called differentiation. The principle is
simple. You can't compete effectively with another product unless
yours is different somehow. Copying good ideas is, of course, a good
idea - but it is by no means clear that that is what we are doing.
There is very good reason for believing we are copying a mistake. Not
a stunningly serious mistake, perhaps, but that hardly counts as a
justification - especially given the much more serious problems with
compatability and credibility.