Booleans, integer division, backwards compatibility; where is Python going?

[Guido van Rossum]

> Guido van Rossum wrote:
> > You clearly fall in the most conservative camp.  I just had a long
> > exchange with someone who pleaded strongly for moving forward at a
> > higher pace, breaking more existing code so that the perfect language
> > can be obtained sooner.
> 
Paul Boddie replied:
> Do such people actually do any real work with the language, though?

Yes, my correspondent is a heavy Python user.

> Wouldn't they be better served by a "big bang, super upgrade" some
> time when all aspects of perfection are ready?

No, he explicitly pleaded against that (pointing to MacOS X as a
counterexample).

> For your amusement, perhaps you should insist that anyone voting (*)
> for particular changes must demonstrate competence with the features
> introduced by such changes (and prove that they're a real user of
> them) before being allowed to ask for any more.

I wish we could insist on some kind of competency test before accepting
someone's contributions, but this is Usenet, even bona fide mental
patients have a chance to be taken seriously by *someone* in the audience.
:-)

> Anyway, I'm still using 2.0 for most things because Unicode was an
> important feature that 2.0 provided. As for the other features
> introduced in 2.0 and later, I can't say that I use any of them apart
> from the += operator - I hardly ever even use the -= operator! I would
> also guess that a reasonable number of people who use the language
> still regard these newer features as advanced or magical, especially
> those people who learned the language in the pre-1.6 days.

And there's nothing wrong with that.  At least, += and list comprehensions
don't break any existing code.

> As far as the 2.2 features are concerned, they seem to have a
> reputation in certain circles as being badly-defined, immature and
> "best steered clear of until later".

Huh?  I'm not sure where you heard that.  Alex Martelli himself just
told me that he is using it and considers it stable.  Maybe the people
who say this themselves deserve a reputation as immature and "best steered
clear of"?

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