On 10:23 pm, a...@pythoncraft.com wrote:
In article <4a998465$0$1637$742ec...@news.sonic.net>,
John Nagle <na...@animats.com> wrote:
Personally, I consider Python to be a good language held back by
too-close ties to a naive interpreter implementation and the lack
of a formal standard for the language.
Name one language under active development that has not been harmed by
a
formal standard. (I think C doesn't count -- there was relatively
little
development of C after the standards process started.)
I think you must mean "harmed by a formal standard more than it has been
helped", since that's clearly the interesting thing.
And it's a pretty difficult question to answer. How do you quantify the
harm done to a language by a standarization process? How do you
quantify the help? These are extremely difficult things to measure
objectively.
For my part, I will agree with John. I feel like Python's big
shortcomings stem from the areas he mentioned. They're related to each
other as well - the lack of a standard hampers the development of a less
naive interpreter (either one based on CPython or another one). It
doesn't completely prevent such development (obviously, as CPython
continues to undergo development, and there are a number of alternate
runtimes for Python-like languages), but there's clearly a cost
associated with the fact that in order to do this development, a lot of
time has to be spent figuring out what Python *is*. This is the kind of
thing that a standard would help with.
Jean-Paul
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