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For me, a python user since the late '90s, the answer has always been simple: Guido has taste.
by fghorow 1y ago
For me, a python user since the late '90s, the answer has always been simple:
Guido has taste.
- rlpb 1y agoHe stepped back and now we have the walrus operator. At least we don't have to use it.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 1y agoGuido approved the walrus. It was the negative response which he said led to him quitting.
- reddit_clone 1y agoCasual python user here. I wasn't aware of this controversy. Why was there a backlash for this operator? (looks kinda neat). Was it breaking things?
- 0cf8612b2e1e 1y agoI am not a keyboard warrior who got caught up in the nonsense, but I think some people were simply annoyed at adding syntactic sugar for very marginal benefit. “There should be one way to do things” mantra. I have a long list of grievances with Python, but the walrus situation would never crack my top ten. Put effort into removing cruft from the standard library, make typing better, have the PSF take a stance on packaging. Anything else feels a better use of time. Whatever, it won. I will never use it, but when I see it will have to scratch my head and lookup the syntax rules.
- zahlman 1y agoIt was against many people's aesthetic sense. Including mine. But in theory it can be ignored completely, and in practice it is barely ever used (and indeed nobody forces you to add more uses). You may be interested in https://learning-python.com/python-changes-2014-plus.html https://learning-python.com/python-changes-2014-plus.html for a sense of what some old-timers' aesthetic sense is like. (I agree with many of these complaints and disagree with many others.)
- librasteve 1y agoLarry Wall thought deeply about how human languages work, not just what a programming language should do mechanically.
- nickpsecurity 1y agoMaybe. He was on the BLACKER VPN project for high-assurance, secure VPN. It had strong requirements for configuration management. Larry Wall was a smart, but lazy, programmer that tired of tedious administration. So, he wrote Perl to automate that. Maybe he did some kind of deep, programming design. It just sounded in that account more like he threw together whatever solved his problem with some nice ideas baked in. Again, that's if it was true that he invented it to automate tedium during BLACKER VPN. BLACKER is described here: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/213253 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/213253 For public examples of A1, look up SCOMP, GEMSOS, and VAX Security Kernel (VMM). Those papers describe the assurance activities required for A1 certification. At the time, due to bootstrapping requirement, tools like Configuration Management didn't have to be A1. People used all kinds of stuff, like Wall building Perl.