Mike Meyer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>... > > The real problem is that newbies won't know which features are "meta" > features best left to experts, and which features are ok for everyday > programmers to use.
I think the original contributor to this thread was fairly accurate when he described some of the confusion that newcomers to Python have upon encountering Python's "transititonal" situation. I recall seeing a thread fairly recently where someone wanted to know if they should be using new-style classes or not, and whilst new-style classes do introduce some desirable behaviour, being told to inherit from object and then seeing lots of older code which doesn't do so raises a certain amount of uncertainty on the part of the newcomer. Everyone likes to criticise Java for additional notation which seems like distracting boilerplate that obstructs the learning process (eg. "public static void main"), but it would be worse if such notation were optional and if programs still had a main function/method by some other now-unfashionable means. Some of that uncertainty (albeit at less visible levels) does now exist in Python, raising the issue of coding "best practices" that I never thought would arise with the language. Paul -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list