On Sun, Oct 13, 2013 at 2:38 PM, Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote: > On Sun, 13 Oct 2013 09:37:58 +1100, Chris Angelico wrote: > >> This is design. Python has a king (Guido). It wasn't built by a >> committee. Maybe you won't like some aspect of Python's design, but it >> has one, it's not just sloppily slapped together. > > > While I agree with your general thrust, I don't think it's quite so > simple. Perl has a king, Larry Wall, but his design is more or less > "throw everything into the pot, it'll be fine" and consequently Perl is, > well, *weird*, with some pretty poor^W strange design decisions.
My apologies, I wasn't exactly clear. Having a king doesn't in any way guarantee a clean design... > Likewise Rasmus Lerdorf, king of PHP (at least initially), but he had no > idea what he was doing: > > "I had no intention of writing a language. I didn't have a clue how to > write a language. I didn't want to write a language," Lerdorf explained. > "I just wanted to solve a problem of churning out Web applications very, > very fast." ... yeah, what he said; but having no king pretty much condemns a project to design-by-committee. Python has a king and a clear design. In any case, we're broadly in agreement here. It's design that makes Python good. That's why the PEP system and the interminable bike-shedding on python-dev is so important... and why, at the end of the day, the PEP's acceptance comes down to one person (Guido or a BDFL-Delegate). ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list