Is Python moving too fast? (was Re: Is python commercializationazing? ...)

[Thomas Wouters]

On Sun, Aug 27, 2000 at 05:15:49PM +0000, David wrote:
> On Sat, 26 Aug 2000 10:11:12 -0500 (CDT), Skip Montanaro <skip at mojam.com>
> wrote:
> >    1.  For the first time in it's 10+ year history, the language actually
> >        has a team of programmers led by Guido whose full-time job is to
> >        work on the language.

> I'm going to be exceedingly crass here, and suggest that when your
> full-time job is to work on the language, you're rather forced to make
> changes for the sake of changes, because otherwise you won't have a job.

Well, that's a bit unfair. Or rather, it's very unfair: a lot of the new
features, and in particular the intrusive ones, are *not* written by the
PythonLabs people. They have mostly been working their arses off at
stabilizing and bugfixing, fixing legal issues, and who-knows-what-else.
Trust me, even if those other Python developers hadn't written augmented
assignment, new ways of importing, list comprehensions, range literals, new
regex-engines, and what not, they would still have more than enough to do.

That isn't to say that they don't want those features, or that they didn't
work at Python 2.0. But they didn't do it as occupational therapy, that's
for sure.
-- 
Thomas Wouters <thomas at xs4all.net>

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