On Sun, 23 Feb 2020 at 02:52, Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Sun, Feb 23, 2020 at 1:15 PM Ethan Furman <et...@stoneleaf.us> wrote:
> >
> > On 02/22/2020 04:37 PM, Chris Angelico wrote:
> >
> > > Do any of the core devs agree with those two assertions?
> >
> > If posts to -Ideas required core dev agreement this would be an empty list
> > indeed.
> >
>
> Heh true. Still, there's not a lot of point discussing a minor first
> step if it's heading towards something that isn't likely ever to
> happen.
To me, the key point is that the proposal currently starts from the
presumption that "a lot of people here find the current behaviour
problematic" and leaps straight to suggesting a first step on the way
to a solution. That's not how things work. Incremental changes are an
implementation plan - you need to get agreement that there's a problem
to be solved, and to the ultimate solution, before looking for
agreement on step 1 of the implementation.
What this proposal lacks is any argument intended to persuade the
people for whom the current behaviour is *not* an issue, that there's
a problem here that needs solving. I'm 100% happy to say that *if* we
wanted to make strings non-iterable, starting by adding a `.chars()`
method would be a reasonable idea. But I'm still a strong -1 on this
proposal because I *don't* want to make strings non-iterable. It's
possible I could be persuaded that non-iterable strings are worth
changing to - so I'm fine with someone trying. But as it stands, this
proposal is irrelevant to me because it's based on assumptions that I
don't agree with.
Framing the discussion as "here's an easy step on the way to the
solution, let's do that", feels to me like precisely the sort of "thin
end of the wedge" argument that is normally flagged as a *flaw* in a
proposal ("yes, this looks good at first but won't it open the door to
this bad consequence?") Using that sort of argument as a deliberate
way of getting to a solution that many people aren't comfortable with
seems at best mistaken, and at worst fairly manipulative. Whatever the
OP's intentions were (and I assume they were good) framing the
argument like this isn't helping their case, IMO.
Paul
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