What python can NOT do?

[exarkun at twistedmatrix.com]

On 10:23 pm, aahz at pythoncraft.com wrote:
>In article <4a998465$0$1637$742ec2ed at news.sonic.net>,
>John Nagle  <nagle at animats.com> wrote:
>>
>>    Personally, I consider Python to be a good language held back by
>>too-close ties to a naive interpreter implementation and the lack
>>of a formal standard for the language.
>
>Name one language under active development that has not been harmed by 
>a
>formal standard.  (I think C doesn't count -- there was relatively 
>little
>development of C after the standards process started.)

I think you must mean "harmed by a formal standard more than it has been 
helped", since that's clearly the interesting thing.

And it's a pretty difficult question to answer.  How do you quantify the 
harm done to a language by a standarization process?  How do you 
quantify the help?  These are extremely difficult things to measure 
objectively.

For my part, I will agree with John.  I feel like Python's big 
shortcomings stem from the areas he mentioned.  They're related to each 
other as well - the lack of a standard hampers the development of a less 
naive interpreter (either one based on CPython or another one).  It 
doesn't completely prevent such development (obviously, as CPython 
continues to undergo development, and there are a number of alternate 
runtimes for Python-like languages), but there's clearly a cost 
associated with the fact that in order to do this development, a lot of 
time has to be spent figuring out what Python *is*.  This is the kind of 
thing that a standard would help with.

Jean-Paul