On Fri, Dec 12, 2014 at 10:28 AM, Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote: > I think that there is a legitimate debate to be had as to whether this > conservativeness and resistance to change is a good thing or a bad thing, > but I don't think that there should be any debate about the reality of the > Python community being strongly conservative, compared to the "anything > goes" attitude of (say) Ruby, Perl and Lisp programmers. We don't like code > that does anything we haven't seen a hundred times before.
I agree that Python is a lot more conservative than many languages, and personally, I think it's good. When it comes to monkeypatching, less is *definitely* better - less places where you have to figure out what import changed the meanings of your built-ins, and so on. (Case in point: A logger replacement tampered with the log.info()/log.error() family of functions, adding a keyword parameter. Took me a fair amount of digging to find out exactly where that happened, and it made REPL importing of the module's functions rather awkward.) The same is true of obscure namespaces, specifically because they're obscure; if I do a JSON decode of something, I'm not going to check to see if numbers came through as a subclass of float with a ".warnings" attribute to tell me about loss of numeric precision, even though that would be perfectly possible. Since almost nobody does this, nobody will expect it to be done, ergo nobody will go looking for it, and the feature may as well not even have been implemented if it's never seen. Popularity *is* sometimes a legitimate argument. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
