Comment on draft PEP for deprecating six builtins

[François Pinard]

[James J. Besemer]

> I think we should be very reluctant about changes that break old code.
> Further we should focus on the important, substantial ones instead of
> dinking around with trivial crap like this.

Granted, Python should reasonably avoid breaking old code.  The proposed
PEP has the virtue of at least trying to propose an acceptable cleanup.
I guess we agree on the fact it fails to do so.

Surely, if we keep adding substance to Python without ever cleaning behind,
Python is going to progressively loose its simplicity (which probably
attracted us all at the beginning) and consequently, part of its legibility.
I'm not at all saying that the PEP should be accepted.  But yet, there is
a real problem in the long run, that we should accept to foresee.

-- 
François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard