Armin Ronacher <armin.ronacher <at> active-4.com> writes:
> I tried my best but obviously it was not good enough to please
> everybody. In all honesty I did not expect that such a small change
> would spawn such a great discussion. After all what we're discussing
> here is the introduction of one letter to literals
The objections are not to the introduction of one letter to literals. It is the
extent to which, in your presentation of the PEP, a narrow set of concerns and a
specific addressing of those concerns has been represented as if it is the only
possible view of all right-thinking people in the Python community. What is
"obvious" to you may not be so to others - au contraire. A PEP author obviously
will promote their specific views - it is an instrument of advocacy - but an
author should not, in my view, arrogate to themselves the presumption of
speaking for everyone in the community; rather, they should respect that others
may have different sensibilities.
The PEP comes across as being primarily motivated by WSGI concerns: Nick
mentioned that he would update the PEP to "name drop" and indicate support from
you, Jacob Kaplan-Moss and Chris McDonough - all authors of Web frameworks.
While I completely acknowledge the importance and ubiquity of these web
frameworks in the overall ecosystem, I think Python the language is about more
than just Web development. There is a bit of a sense of the tail wagging the
dog. Let's remember, it's possible to do Web development without the concept of
"native" strings - this doesn't exist AFAIK in many other languages which allow
Web applications to be developed - the concept is a sort of historical accident
arising in part out of how the WSGI spec was written and evolved, interacting
with how 3.x differs from 2.x, and how some legacy APIs expect native strings
because they are broken.
There are a number of possible ways of addressing the concerns which motivated
the PEP, but in my view you have given some of them short shrift because of what
come across as personal prejudices. An example - on a Reddit thread about PEP
414, I commented:
"The PEP does not (for example) consider the possibility of leaving literals as
they are and using a n('xxx') callable for native strings. Since there are very
few places where native strings are needed, this approach is potentially less
obtrusive than either u'xxx' or u('xxx')."
Your response to this was:
"Because in all honesty, because string wrappers make a codebase horrible to
work with. I will have to continue maintaining 2.x versions for at least another
four or five years. The idea if having to use string wrappers for that long
makes me puke."
I know that this was just a comment on Reddit and was not in the PEP, but it
smacks of you throwing all your toys out of the pram. It certainly wasn't a
reasoned response to my point. And some of that toys-pram attitude bleeds
through into the language of the PEP, leading others to make the criticisms that
they have. A PEP is supposed to be balanced, reasonable and thought through.
It's not supposed to gloss over things in a hand-wavy sort of way - there's
still uncertainty in my mind, for example, whether the 3.2 hook will be a
2to3-style tool that runs over a chunk of the whole project's codebase between
editing and running a test, or whether it's an import-time hook which only kicks
in on files that have just been edited in a development session. Which of these
it is might affect crucially the experience of someone wanting to support 3.2
and 3.3 and 2.6+ - but that clearly isn't you, and you don't seem to have much
sympathy or patience with that constituency - we're all stick-in-the-muds who
want to work with Ubuntu LTS, rather than people subject to constraints imposed
by employers, clients, projects we depend on etc.
In contrast, Nick made a more reasonable case when commenting ion my preference
for unicode_literals (on this list, not on Reddit), by reminding me about how
unicode_literals changes the semantics of string literals, and this increases
the cognitive burden on developers.
I'm not whinging about the PEP in this post - I've said elsewhere that I wasn't
opposed to it. I'm just trying to respond to your apparent bewilderment at some
of the reaction to the PEP.
I have confidence that with your continued input and Nick's input, the wording
of the PEP can be made such that it doesn't ruffle quite so many feathers. I'm
looking forward to seeing the updates.
Regards,
Vinay Sajip
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