"I have a mind like a steel... uh... thingy." Patrick Logan's weblog.

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Thursday, January 06, 2005

Crying Out Loud

All of a sudden blogs are not about an ongoing discussion?

Gordon and Ian both write about the reaction to Guido's posting very preliminary thoughts on what would be a controversial change to the Python language.

The question they raise is this: does the reaction imply that Guido has to be somehow more "careful" with what he chooses to write?

This question puzzles me. I am assuming Guido published his thoughts in order to *get* a reaction. Should the kind of reaction he gets be considered a problem?

Dictators had better have thick skin. Let's assume he can handle it and continue to speculate. That's what blogs are for, right?

You publish your thoughts, I'll publish mine. The result will be a web of thoughts, and presumably this will be better for the whole community as compared to being afraid and secretive.

People don't "need to chill". People need to *write*!

4 comments:

Ian Bicking said...

It just seems to me that people are taking Guido's strawman proposal, and then deciding that Python as a whole is on the brink of disaster. I'm not too psyched about the proposal either, but that only reflects on the proposal, not on the entire future of Python. If this was a PEP about to be accepted, sure, but it's not, so we can be a little more relaxed about it.

Patrick Logan said...

If one would be shocked and reluctant to use the Python language as a whole based on the proposal as it stands then Guido should get that information as soon as possible. I'm in that category.

What concerns me more is the notion that Guido should hesitate to express his nascent thoughts just because people might be shocked. Will this reaction influence his further thought process? Yes, and it should be welcomed.

Robert Church said...

Personally, I'm a bit disturbed that optional type annotations are the issue on which Guido chooses to spend his time speculating. It seems to demonstrate that Guido has an unusual notion of what Python is about.

He can, of course, have any kind of vision of Python that he wants, but I'm a little shocked at the degree to which it differs from mine.

Ian Bicking said...

Guido isn't paid to work on Python, he's as much a volunteer as anyone (well, maybe not quite as much, but somewhere in there). Volunteers work on what they think is interesting.

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Portland, Oregon, United States
I'm usually writing from my favorite location on the planet, the pacific northwest of the u.s. I write for myself only and unless otherwise specified my posts here should not be taken as representing an official position of my employer. Contact me at my gee mail account, username patrickdlogan.