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“I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”

(mail.python.org)
2024 points randlet | 4 comments | 12 Jul 18 15:22 UTC | HN request time: 0.666s | source
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AdmiralAsshat ◴[12 Jul 18 16:02 UTC] No.17515876[source]▶
What was the issue that was evidently so contentious that it made him wish to step down?
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Analemma_ ◴[12 Jul 18 16:09 UTC] No.17515959[source]▶
(a := b) rather than a = b

Naturally people went to the barricades for it, in a classic example of bikeshedding and Wadler's Law (programmers will fight to the death over trivial syntax disagreements and just shrug at profound changes to semantics and architecture)

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1. Herald_MJ ◴[12 Jul 18 16:19 UTC] No.17516054[source]▶
That's not an accurate summary of assignment expressions.

Assignment expressions perform the assignment and also return the value of the assignment. So you can assign and test a conditional at the same time. It's quite an elegant alternative to some quite verbose repetitive code you would otherwise have to write in some scenarios.

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2. Analemma_ ◴[12 Jul 18 16:26 UTC] No.17516133[source]▶
I'm sorry, I should have clarified. There was a lot more to the PEP than what I mentioned, it just seemed to me like the loudest and dumbest arguments against it were complaining about the colon and not anything substantive.
3. wenc ◴[12 Jul 18 16:27 UTC] No.17516145[source]▶
Assignment expressions are also found in languages like C#, and have proven to be of great practical value.

f-strings was another Python 3 idea that was pre-dated by an implementation in C# [1] ($-interpolation) and it was a popular idea in that language too.

I don't want to proffer an opinion on PEP 572 since I haven't followed the discussions, but these things have been "bench-tested" in other languages and not been found wanting, so I do wonder a little bit about the true cause of the controversy.

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/language-refe...

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4. Herald_MJ ◴[12 Jul 18 20:33 UTC] No.17518369[source]▶
Yes, I don't really understand the controversy either. I work with Python a lot in my day job, and I am quite frustrated with how slowly the language moves. For a long time, it seemed like the reason was the Python 2-3 switch, but now we don't have that excuse, and things are still slow. Every little decision seems to get immobilised at the PEP stage.