"as" keyword woes

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Tue, 09 Dec 2008 05:48:29 -0800, Paul Boddie wrote:

> Well, I think it's more interesting to explore the boundaries of what
> can be done, to debunk notions that such things aren't being done in the
> mainstream, and to examine whether they could benefit usability, than it
> is to defer to the Zen of Python as some kind of prescriptive,
> near-religious text at every turn.

Go right ahead. Write your experimental language, and if people like it, 
they'll use it. That's what Guido did, all those years ago. But don't 
turn Python into a hodgepodge of "features" that most people consider 
misfeatures.

The Zen certainly is prescriptive, but it's not "near-religious" in any 
sense. It's a distillation of probably hundreds of man-years of 
programming experience from people like Guido and Tim Peters into a small 
number of heuristics about the sorts of design decisions which have been 
proven to be successful in the past.

I think it is childish to reject the Zen just because it's the Zen. Good 
advice doesn't cease to be good advice just because people tell you it's 
good advice, even if some people are awfully strident about it.



-- 
Steven