[Python-ideas] A bit meta

[Chris Angelico]

On Sat, Jan 30, 2016 at 1:31 AM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> The python-dev and python-ideas communities form a very important part
> of that process, but the most valuable things folks bring are
> additional perspectives (whether that's in the form of different use
> cases, additional domains of expertise, knowledge of practices in
> other programming language communities, etc)

This. As mentioned in PEP 10 [1], it's the explanations and
justifications, far more than the votes, that make the real
difference. That said, though, the votes are a great way of gauging
the support levels for a set of similar proposals (eg syntactic
options), where the proposer of the idea doesn't particularly care
which of the options is picked. It's still not in any way democratic,
as evidenced by the vote in PEP 308 [2], which had four options
clearly better than the others, but the one that's now in the language
was the last of those four in the votes.

ChrisA

[1] https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0010/
[2] https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0308/