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[Python-ideas] A bit meta

Steven D'Aprano steve at pearwood.info
Fri Jan 29 23:10:02 EST 2016 
On Fri, Jan 29, 2016 at 05:56:57PM +0000, Brett Cannon wrote:

> A better fit would be something like https://www.uservoice.com/ if people
> wanted a focused "vote on ideas" solution, 

I don't think treating language design as a participatory democracy 
would be a good idea, even if it were practical. (How could you get all 
Python users to vote? Do casual users who only use Python occasionally 
get fractional votes?) If it were, Python would probably look and behave 
a lot more like PHP.

And even representative democracy has practical problems. (Who speaks 
for the users of numpy? Sys admins? Teachers?)

I'm 100% in favour of community participation and would like to 
encourage people to participate and be heard, but I don't think we 
should have any illusions about the fundamentally non-democratic nature 
of language design. Nor do I think that's necessarily a bad thing. Not 
everything needs to be decided by voting.

I think it is far more honest to admit that language design is always 
going to be an authoritarian process where a small elite, possibly even 
a single person, decides what makes it into the language and what 
doesn't, than to try to claim democratic legitimcy via voting that 
cannot possibly be representative.



> or something like
> https://www.discourse.org/ for a more modern forum platform that has the
> concept of likes for a thread.

Ah, "like" buttons. The way to feel good about yourself for 
participating without actually participating :-)

Well, I suppose it's a bit less disruptive than having hordes of 
"Me too!!!1!" posts.



-- 
Steve
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