Python as Guido Intended

[Delaney, Timothy (Tim)]

Ben Sizer wrote:

> I agree with you that sometimes, the responses here can come across as
> a bit condescending. I don't think this is intentional, as everybody
> seems friendly enough, but I do see a pattern of people replying to a
> query and implying that the original poster should know better than to
> ask for whatever they asked, despite the Pythonic solutions suggested
> often differing algorithmically from the best solution in other
> languages.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

This is a technical newsgroup, and pretty much everything there applies.
Fortunately for people who don't know better, comp.lang.python (aka
python-list) is much friendlier and less condescending than most other
technical forums (I've been involved in quite a few, and c.l.py is
easily the best).

It is without a doubt though incumbent on anyone proposing new
*features* to have a solid understanding of what they are proposing,
what it would affect, any backwards incompatibilities, and whether it
fits into the python philosophy (import this). Failure to have
considered all of these is likely to be shot down in flames. New syntax
is especially likely to have unintended consequences that many of us
will think should have been obvious if you've used python much.

And this is the crux of it - the majority of such proposals come from
people who apparently haven't actually used python that much, and are
trying to impose things from other languages onto it. There's nothing
wrong with bringing concepts across from other languages (look at the
"generators" history), but you need to understand how it will fit with
python before proposing it as a new feature.

Tim Delaney