Does Python really follow its philosophy of "Readability counts"?

[Rhodri James]

On Fri, 23 Jan 2009 21:28:22 -0000, Paul Rubin  
<"http://phr.cx"@nospam.invalid> wrote:

> Mark Wooding <mdw at distorted.org.uk> writes:
>> Now we come on to Fred.  If Fred's across the room from me then we're
>> back to the water-cooler.  If he's on a different continent, and I know
>> he'll be affected, I'll probably email him.  If I've never heard of him
>> at all, well, he might just lose when someone puts my code and Fred's
>> together with OrderedDict...
>
> In a large project, more probably you'd enter a change request into
> some kind of tracking system, there would be discussion in the
> tracking system about how to do the change; perhaps at your weekly
> staff meeting you might bring up the issue with your PHB if you were
> blocking on the issue, and your PHB would bring it up at the inter-PHB
> meeting with Fred's PHB to bump the item's priority, and eventually
> Fred would check in a change and you would use it.  There is
> necessarily some wasted motion in any organization of that size; good
> management is about keeping the friction to a minimum and getting the
> stuff done.

My experience with medium-sized organisations (50-100 people) is that
either you talk to Fred directly, or it doesn't happen.  In particular
the more people (especially PHBs) that get involved, the slower the
change will come and the less like your original requirement it will
look.  Each person, no matter how technically adept, has a significant
chance of misunderstanding what it is you need and/or expressing it
poorly to the next person in line.

If I need something that goes 'ping' by Friday, and get something
that goes 'pong' three weeks later (together with a note from Fred
telling me that three-and-fourpence isn't going to get me into any
of the good dance clubs), I'd have been better off taking a hacksaw
to the internals myself and presenting my fix for Fred's
consideration.  Python allows me to do this without the fuss and
drama that strict encapsulation seems to posit is necessary,
instead of delaying an entire release cycle because the process
doesn't trust me.

-- 
Rhodri James *-* Wildebeeste Herder to the Masses