Dr. Dobb's Python-URL! - weekly Python news and links (Aug 23)

[Anthony Baxter]

On Tue, 24 Aug 2004 09:14:05 +0200, Peter Otten <__peter__ at web.de> wrote:
> The fraction of your posts I have read went from (I'm sharpening)
> "What crap are you proposing as an alternative to '@'? Guido won't listen
> anyway" to "If you want it, at least get it right"
> I liked that and that's why you are in the Python-URL.

That's probably a way of reading it - although I think my original
"Guido won't listen" were more probably "Guido doesn't care about
people voting that they hate a syntax". Dictators are like that.

And yes, some of my posts could probably be interpreted as "what crap is this?" 

On the other hand, I've been really quite impressed how much useful
effort has been channelled out what were initially quite rabid posts
(on both sides <wink>) into a useful result (the J2 paper, the J2
implementation). It speaks positively about the python community that
this was done, and done, by and large, without much participation from
any of the existing python developers[1].

Regardless of what result comes out of this, I think that this has
been a good thing - as I think I commented earlier in this thread,
after the mega-horror of the ternary operators meltdown, it's good to
see from the point of view of community involvement in the language.

[1] I don't count my snarking as a particularly useful form of
participation - more a combination of trying to keep people honest and
my normal contrariness.