Are the critiques in "All the things I hate about Python" valid?

[Ned Batchelder]

On 2/18/18 6:33 AM, bartc wrote:
> On 18/02/2018 01:39, Chris Angelico wrote:
>> On Sun, Feb 18, 2018 at 12:31 PM, bartc <bc at freeuk.com> wrote:
>>> On 18/02/2018 00:45, Chris Angelico wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On Sun, Feb 18, 2018 at 11:13 AM, bartc <bc at freeuk.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>> It's text, but it is an intermediate or "object" file. It's not doing
>>>> pointless stuff; it's coping with the myriad platforms and variants
>>>> that Python has support for.
>>>
>>>
>>> It could well do all that. But it surely cannot need 18,000 lines' 
>>> worth to
>>> do it; that much should be obvious to anyone. And in fact, for 
>>> building with
>>> MS's Visual Studio, it doesn't use that file at all, but something 
>>> smaller.
>>> (Although the MS build adds its own complexities.)
>>
>> You're arguing against a strawman, and you know it. Either that, or
>> you have a fundamental misunderstanding of "intermediate files", in
>> which case I recommend you spend some time with a web search engine.
>>
>> I'm done.
>
> Then you have your head in the sand. Whether you are looking at the 
> 18000-line file, or the 5000-line one, you should be asking yourself 
> what on earth any of that gobbledygook has to do with compiling CPython?
>
> What files does it generate or modify, if any; what is the end result 
> of it?
>
> According to the diagram here: 
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Configure_script, the eventual output is 
> a config.h file, and a makefile. Hey, why don't they just provide 
> those files?! (Sometimes projects do just that, provide a range of 
> makefiles for example.)
>
> Then it just needs 'make', which is a tool that comes with the C 
> compiler that is needed anyway.
>
> (However, I don't even use 'make'; look at the arrow between the 
> 'make' process and the executable: implied here are invocations of 
> tools such as compilers and linkers. This is where I usually work. 
> This is all that is usually needed.)
>

Let's not go down this path yet again.  We've heard it all before. Bart: 
stop it.  Everyone else: stop it. :)

--Ned.