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Was the walrus operator really worth "The PEP 572 mess"? https://lwn.net/Articles/757713/ https://lwn.net/Articles/757713/ That post makes a few things very c

Was the walrus operator really worth "The PEP 572 mess"? https://lwn.net/Articles/757713/ https://lwn.net/Articles/757713/ That post makes a few things very clear: * The argument over the feature did not establish an explicit measure of efficacy for the feature. The discussion struggled to even find relevant non-Toy code examples. * The communication over the feature was almost entirely over email, even when it got extremely contentious. There was later some face-to-face talk at the summit. * Guido stepped down.

contravariant 7y ago
It may not have been a fair trade, but then it wasn't a trade in the first place. Those all seem to be problems with the process itself, meaning that it could have happened any time a contentious feature came up, this just happened to be the one to trigger the problem.
- choppaface 7y ago
  I agree that a mess looked (sadly) inevitable based upon that post and some of the other surrounding context. E.g. Guido citing Yoda conditions, how dumb that game can be, and getting ignored. But just because the feature shipped and design-by-committee is upon us doesn't mean we need to accept the outcome. Why couldn't there have been a more evolutionary path for this feature? For example, there is surely a way to write a prototype library to accomplish the same effect with slightly different syntax. (How about a single function `walrus(a, b)` that does what `:=` does?). Then let real user adoption drive the change. Maybe somebody will discover case statements from scala and want that instead. I hope the committee models some amount of their work after WG21. C++ hasn't evolved so effectively because some people were magic visionaries. For the past decade, C++ has mostly ridden on the proven success of boost. And skipped a lot of the parts of boost that suck.

contravariant 7y ago

It may not have been a fair trade, but then it wasn't a trade in the first place. Those all seem to be problems with the process itself, meaning that it could have happened any time a contentious feature came up, this just happened to be the one to trigger the problem.

choppaface 7y ago
I agree that a mess looked (sadly) inevitable based upon that post and some of the other surrounding context. E.g. Guido citing Yoda conditions, how dumb that game can be, and getting ignored. But just because the feature shipped and design-by-committee is upon us doesn't mean we need to accept the outcome. Why couldn't there have been a more evolutionary path for this feature? For example, there is surely a way to write a prototype library to accomplish the same effect with slightly different syntax. (How about a single function `walrus(a, b)` that does what `:=` does?). Then let real user adoption drive the change. Maybe somebody will discover case statements from scala and want that instead. I hope the committee models some amount of their work after WG21. C++ hasn't evolved so effectively because some people were magic visionaries. For the past decade, C++ has mostly ridden on the proven success of boost. And skipped a lot of the parts of boost that suck.