CamelCase versus wide_names (Prothon)

[Mark Hahn]

"Erik Max Francis" <max at alcyone.com> wrote ...

> I'm surprised you're creating your own language and don't have enough
> internal stylistic sense to make this choice yourself.

You must have some pre-conceived image of what kind of person is required to
create a language.  I'd like to know more about this person.

I'm just a geek with a big ego who happens to love to create powerful simple
things.  My stylistic sense is centered around making an interpreter that
runs on a simpler principle than other languages but is more flexible and
more powerful.  I could care less about the appearance of variables or even
the syntax of the language, as long as it works well with my engine.

If I could I'd run pure Python, totally unchanged, on top of my interpreter,
but Python is not compatible with my simple engine.

If you visit the Prothon mailing lists you'll see that I'm letting everyone
else choose the language pretty much, except that I'm constantly trying to
make it simpler.  They even had to argue to get me to use bound methods.  I
had the crazy idea that they weren't needed.

So to make a long story short, I guess the language is being created by the
mailing list, not me.  It will look quite different than the one that I went
public with a few weeks ago when it gets frozen in July.

I do fully realize the need for a BDFL though to keep it from being
"designed by commitee".  Don't tell Guido I said this, but the BDFL doesn't
really have to be a genius.  He just has to keep things moving and have
enough common sense to let the good contributors win out in the arguments.