On 6/20/06, fernando moreira <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > But what i would expect from a really pythonic interpreter is "He he he... > Another newbie that does not know strings are imutable. I am a very friendly > interpreter of a very intuitive language; ). So, behind the scenes i will > send the present string to trash after i create another one with the same > variable´s name. Thus the newbies will keep smiling and saying that python > rocks !"
i think you need to distiguish between design choices and taste choices. when you make choices based on taste, you decide each case on what you would prefer, and sort things out later. when you make design choices, you balance the consequences or your choices against the other choices that need to be made. the art in language design is making choices that reconcile well with one another, and hopefully best satisfy the *needs* of the programmers most often. the most remarkable success of python, as a language, may be the degree to which it caters gracefully to a broad range of needs, even satisfying many tastes in the process. don't make the mistake of believing, though, that it was driven by those tastes. how do you distinguish a whim from a need? guido often asks, "what is it that you actually *need* to do?" are you actually struggling with a limitation that's preventing you from doing what your need, or is your answer, "it would just be nice", or "it's more pythonic". if it's just "nice" or "pythonic", he won't listen. if you can cite something practical that needs doing and can't be done without pain as things stand, then good language developers will listen, and help find a good solution if possible. they mostly pay attention to practice and consequences, not taste, and that's why python works well. (my experience is much more in design and development of applications than of languages, but this principle applies at least as well there. i've spent too much time developing a feature that was unnecessary, only to discover that i lost much more in the distortion of my application design than i gained in the extraneous feature, not to mention the waste of time spent on the feature development. i can only imagine how frustrating this could be in language development.) -- ken [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://myriadicity.net Python is an experiment in how much freedom programmers need. Too much freedom and nobody can read another's code; too little and expressiveness is endangered. -- Guido van Rossum, 13 Aug 1996 _______________________________________________ users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ironpython.com/listinfo.cgi/users-ironpython.com
