Python 3K or Python 2.9?

[Bruno Desthuilliers]

TheFlyingDutchman a écrit :
> On Sep 17, 4:02 am, Steve Holden <st... at holdenweb.com> wrote:
(snip)

> I made a complaint about a small design choice.

It's by no mean a "small" design choice.

> I also made it in the
> past tense at least once ("should have done it") and explicitly
> expressed that I knew it wasn't going to happen. Python was created
> based on a language that was designed to make it easy to use by
> beginners.

Most beginners still find Python easy to use AFAICT. At least, I know a 
lot of *non* programmers using it.

> Doing so made it a clean and clear language. My preference
> is for everything to be as clean and clear as possible. 

Mine too, and that's why I like Python the way it is : syntactic sugar 
for the common cases, *and* and easy way to play with lower levels when 
necessary.

(snip)
> Jury-rigging new features is going to make the elite happy but very
> likely will be viewed differently by us average programmers.

"us" ? Who is "us" ?

>>change other aspects of the language, such as the ability to graft
>>functions into instances and classes as methods.
>  
> Those are elite-type features  that make code harder to understand by
> average programmers and probably the elite as well. 

Good news, there's a language designed exactly for "average programmers" 
that find these kind of features - as well as anything as complex as 
operator overloading, metaclasses, descriptors, higher order functions, 
multiple inheritance, lazy evaluation, and anything dynamic - way too 
"elite". It's named Java. The only drawback is that instead of "elite 
features", you'll have to resort to mumbo-jumbo overcomplexified "design 
patterns" and write ten times more code to solve the simplest things.

To make a long story short: if you don't understand some "advanced" 
Python's features, then just don't use them. But have mercy and let us 
"elite programmers" (lol...) use more of Python's power.