[Python-ideas] PEP 3107 Function Annotations: interoperability (again)

[Guido van Rossum]

On 1/3/07, Collin Winter <collinw at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/1/07, Brett Cannon <brett at python.org> wrote:
> > Until extensive usage happens with annotations we shouldn't try to shoehorn
> > consumers of the annotations into a specific solution.  As you said,
> > something will probably organically grow and that can be supported in
> > another PEP later on (probably with stdlib support).
>
> I agree that a convention will develop organically, but I would add
> that the emergence of that convention will be governed by two things:
> who has the bigger market share, and who's first to market. When the
> first big project like Zope or Twisted announces that "we will do
> annotation interop like so...", everyone else will be pressured to
> line up behind them. Until that happens, smaller projects like mine
> will either a) not support annotation interop (because there's no
> good, obvious solution), or b) pick an interop scheme at random
> (again, because there's no good, obvious solution).

Actually, I think that's a pretty good way to arrive at a good
solution. I don't this is something you can analyze on paper ahead of
time; there aren't really any precedents I suspect (do you know of any
other language that has semantics-free signature annotations?). You
must've "built two and thrown one away" before you really know what
the constraints are on the solution.

I realize this is frustrating for you, but I really don't think it's
appropriate to pre-empty this with a standardization attempt
before-the-fact (remember ISO networking?). You could be first to
market yourself -- after all you already have a type checking package!

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)