Fat and happy Pythonistas (was Re: Replacement for keyword 'global' good idea? ...)

[Donn Cave]

Quoth Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org>:
| "John Roth" <newsgroups at jhrothjr.com> writes:
...
|> It seems to be the concensus on this group anyway: declarative typing
|> does not give enough improvement in program correctness to override
|> more concise programs and TDD. That may,  of course, be wishful
|> thinking on the Python community's part.
|
| "The concensus of this group" is a *long* way from "the debate has
| moved on". I agree that it's the concensus of this group - but this is
| a group devoted to a dynamic programming language. If you go to a
| group devoted to a statically typed language, you'll find a different
| concensus. Which means the debate is still very much alive.

Also an OOP group, which tends to mean that experience with static
typing will have been with C++ or Java, or similar languages.  The
ideas I've read for P3000 fortunately show some influence from the
type inference systems popular in FP.  What people in this group
think is frankly irrelevant if they're thinking in terms of Java.

| So we have one (count him, 1) user who complains that it's changing to
| fast. I suspect most readers here would disagree with him.

True, but another statistic that's compromised by self-selecting
population.  Earlier in this thread our attention was directed to
an article announcing a fairly radical drop in popularity of Python
(and other interpreted languages) for new projects outside of North
America, citing failure to penetrate the "enterprise" market as a
reason.  Ask the enterprise world if they think Python is changing
fast enough.  Maybe they're giving up on Python because they decided
they'd never get code blocks.  (Ha ha.)

	Donn Cave, donn at drizzle.com