a different question: can you earn a living with *just* python?

[Paul Rubin]

Roy Smith <roy at panix.com> writes:
> The problem is, if the complex features are there, people will use them.  
> On any large project, there will always be some people who revel in using 
> every obscure feature of a language.  That forces everybody else on the 
> team (and all future members of the team) to know (or learn) those features 
> in order to be able to use and maintain the code base.

On any large project, there tends to be one person who understands any
particular piece of the code in it and is generally in charge of it;
any requests for changes affecting that file usually get routed to
that person.  Maybe another person or two has had their hand in it at
one time or another and could catch up on it if they needed to.
Everybody else has their own area that they stay on top of, and have
little clue about the other parts.  In the case of metaclasses, there
might be some important class that uses special metaclasses and is
maintained by an expert.  Other people simply use that class and make
calls to it but don't have to mess with it very often.  That is what
modularity is about.

Decorators are another matter, but they aren't really confusing
like metaclasses, and are useful in a lot of places.