On Sun, Jan 19, 2020 at 3:10 PM Tim Peters <tim.pet...@gmail.com> wrote:
> [Guido, on Pythons before 1.0.2 always printing non-None expression > statement results] > > Heh. That was such a misfeature that I had thoroughly suppressed any > > memory of its existence. -k indeed. :-) > > I prefer to think of it as a bit of genius :-) > > The natural desire to avoid mounds of useless output taught all of us, > core developers and end users, to code mutating methods as procedures > (always return None) rather than functions. > > The thing that amazed me at the time (and still does with hindsight!) > is how very few complaints that attracted! Because it really was a > horrible misfeature ;-) > My guess is that method chaining wasn't in widespread use, and languages that made a distinction between functions and procedures (a la Pascal and Fortran) were more common than they are now. One thing that we lost when we dropped this: the bug where a user wrote `foo` rather than `foo()` was caught more reliably then. Similarly, in the async world, there's a common mistake where users write `foo()` rather than `await foo()`, and that behavior would have caught such bugs. Now we can't even flag such things statically (e.g. in mypy) because people might complain that they *meant* to write what they wrote (since it works). -- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido) *Pronouns: he/him **(why is my pronoun here?)* <http://feministing.com/2015/02/03/how-using-they-as-a-singular-pronoun-can-change-the-world/>
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