Please ignore if you are allergic to ramblings :-)
Despite a puritan streak I've always tried to refrain from language wars or syntax bickering; call it enforced pragmatism. That's the main reason why I've liked Python: it's elegant and simple and still dynamic and flexible. You could do worse for a clean and pragmatic language.
I do know my Smaltalk from my Common Lisp and my Ruby from my C#, so I think I'm quite capable of escaping the "Blub paradox" http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?BlubParadox. I do miss some slick features in Python. But the nice thing about Python is that in those cases I can use its dynamism to implement it myself (and usually somebody else has done it for me, of course).
In the end I'm not a language guru nor a framework wizard, but a mere mortal who designs and writes programs for end-users. For that task I need: a better standard ide, an integrated db interface with a proper set of db drivers (!!), a better debugger, a standard widget/windows toolkit, something akin to a standard for web programming, better documentation, a standard lib which is better organized, a formalized set of protocols and patterns for program construction. And an interpreter which is fast enough to avoid using C or Pyrex in most obvious cases.
Many will say that Van Rossum's brainstorms/proposals as depicted in
http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=86641
will help in the above mentioned. And I'm certainly not against Optional ype checking.
But I see little to no efforts from the core python team to address my needs as listed above. They seem mainly to focus on the core attributes and syntax of the language. Very little or no efforts are taken to improve the infrastructure around the language.
And then I read the following sentence by Van Rossum:
"In order to make type inferencing a little more useful, I'd like to restrict certain forms of extreme dynamic behavior in Python"
In the end, it's mindset which counts. And I think that mindset is going to be determine the way foreward for Python: more features, increased complexity, less dynamism. Lots of syntax crud, without addressing the need to improve the infrastructure around the language.
In short: I symphatize Patrick Logan's feeling:
http://patricklogan.blogspot.com/2005/01/road-to-ruin.html
Regards,
Iwan van der Kleyn -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
