How much is set in stone?

[Paul Rubin]

"Tim Peters" <tim.one at home.com> writes:
> I invite anyone who cares to study the bug lists for Perl, gcc and
> Python, and draw an informed conclusion from that.  You (Paul) have
> spread FUD about 2.1.1 before, and I can assure you we didn't pay
> everyone on c.l.py to refrain from posting "me too!", neither to
> write about their Python apps running for months at a time.  Your
> experience remains unique, irreproducible (last I heard), and
> *could* be caused by any number of computer problems, both hardware
> and software.  While *a priori* a crash in a Python program is most
> likely a bug in Python, the lack of any confirming reports also
> requires explanation.

It's not intended as FUD.  Other people did report similar crashes.
It's conceivable that my crashes weren't caused by Python bugs, but
signs don't point that way.

Comparing Python with Perl, generally I find Python better designed
but its implementation more likely to take short cuts.  The security
issue with pickle.loads that we spent a long time discussing is
something I think the perl developers would not have tolerated.
There's all kinds of other missing functionality in the runtime system
as well, that doesn't result directly in unrobust programs, but does
make it more difficult to write robustly.  A lot of this ng is about
the resulting issues.

I think Python is promising and exciting and I like programming in it.
It's just inaccurate to say it's as far along in development as some
other languages.