On Sun, Apr 22, 2012 at 6:34 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncogh...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, Apr 23, 2012 at 9:27 AM, Alexandre Vassalotti > <alexan...@peadrop.com> wrote: >> On Sun, Apr 22, 2012 at 6:12 PM, <mar...@v.loewis.de> wrote: >>> Of course, this being free software, anybody can spend time on whatever >>> they >>> please, and this should not make anybody feel sad. You just don't get >>> merits >>> if you work on stuff that nobody cares about. >> >> >> Yes, of course. I don't want to discourage anyone to investigate this >> option—in fact, I would very much like to see myself proven wrong. But, if I >> understood Stefan correctly, he is proposing to have a GSoC student to do >> the work, to which I would feel uneasy about since we have no idea how >> valuable this would be as a contribution. > > So long as it's made clear to the students applying that it's a proof > of concept that may return a negative result (i.e. "it was tried, it > proved to be a bad idea") I don't see a problem with it. The freedom > to try out multiple ideas in parallel is one of the great strengths of > open source. > > We've had GSoC students try unsuccessful experiments in the past and > have gained useful information as a result (e.g. the main reason I > know the Import Engine API proposed in the deferred PEP 406 isn't > adequate as currently written is because of the design level problems > Greg found when implementing it last summer. The currently documented > design simply doesn't achieve the full objectives of the PEP)
However, I think that in this case the success may be predetermined, or at least not determined by technical success alone. I have a lot of respect for Cython, but I don't think it is right to have any part of core Python depend on it. Cython is an incredibly complex and relatively young (and still fast evolving) piece of technology, while I think that core dependencies should be minimized and limited to absolutely fundamental building blocks. -- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido) _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com