On 21 April 2015 at 17:55, Gregory P. Smith <g...@krypto.org> wrote: > I view most of this thread as FUD. The fear is understandable, I'm trying to > tell people to stop panicing.
I think (hope!) everyone is clear that what's being expressed in this thread is honest (emotional) reactions. There's a negative connotation to the term FUD that's uncomfortable in this context, although it's understandable that the authors and supporters of the PEP feel frustrated about the feedback, so merely using terms with negative connotations is a pretty measured response, actually :-) We've got people expressing fear and others telling them not to panic. Realistically, just being told not to panic won't help. What will help is feeling that the fears are understood and being considered, even if ultimately the response is "we think it'll be alright - wait and see". Most people contributing to this thread have probably not been involved in the earlier discussions (I know I tuned out of the threads on python-ideas) so are now reacting at short notice to what looks like a big change. Things should calm down in due course, but "what the heck is all this?" reactions are to be expected. And honestly, the PEP is pretty difficult to read. That's probably the nature of the subject (my eyes glaze over when reading about type theory) but it doesn't help. When I read the PEP, after a few sections I found myself losing focus because I kept thinking "but what about X?" Result - I didn't manage to read the whole PEP and came away with a feeling that all those things I thought of "couldn't be handled". Not a positive reaction, unfortunately. That's the fault of the reader rather than the PEP, but maybe the PEP could include a "common concerns/FAQ" section, with discussions of the issues people are worried about? One final point. The overwhelming feeling I'm getting about the debate is that the main response to people with concerns is "you don't have to use it" and "it's optional". But that's not the point - we're talking past each other to an extent. I (and I presume most others) understand the fact that type hints are optional. We may or may not use them ourselves (I'm not actually ruling out that I might end up liking them!) But that's not the concern - what we're trying to understand is how we, as a community of programmers, and an ecosystem of interdependent codebases, deal with the possibility that there could be two differing philosophies (to hint or not to hint) trying to work together. Maybe it'll be a non-event, and we carry on as usual. Maybe nobody will use types in public code for years, because we all end up having to support 2.x whether we want to or not. Maybe we shouldn't try to solve big social issues like that and we should just trust in the fact that Python has a great community who *will* find a way to work together. I don't know, but that's my real question, and "it's optional" isn't really the response I'm looking for. (The response I probably deserve is likely "don't take it all so seriously", and it's probably fair. I apologise - it's been that sort of day :-)) Paul _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
