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Voting for PEP 308 (was Re: For review: PEP 308

Voting for PEP 308 (was Re: For review: PEP 308 - If-then-else expression)

Laura Creighton lac at strakt.com
Tue Feb 11 01:46:30 EST 2003 
> > From: Laura Creighton [mailto:lac at strakt.com]
> > 
> > Most of the people who don't care will also not be posting.  Or
> > voting. They're probably not reading comp.lang.python, either.  I
> > remember when 2.0 came out and people found out about string methods.
> > A whole bunch of them came back to post articles about how they
> > thought the new join syntax was really awful and ugly.  They only
> > cared after it got in, but enough to complain a lot.
> 
> Actually, some of us were posting about how we thought the new join syntax wa
> s really awful and ugly (and unintuitive) well before 2.0 came out.
> 
> Some of us still are <0.1 wink> and still use string.join(seq, sep) and will 
> fight vigorously to prevent it being removed, even though it's deprecated.
> 
> We were unfortunately unsuccessful in convincing people that some things are 
> better as a function accepting multiple arguments than as a method of one of 
> those two arguments.

I hadn't forgotten about you, merely pointing out that there was a
lot of 'Python programmers who weren't around for the debate' who
showed up later and said 'eeee-yuck!'  If this had gone to a vote, and
we had been able to find them, we now know how they would have voted.
But that is the point -- we weren't able to find them.  They only
found us later, to complain.  This is an extremely well known problem
with deciding things by votes.  Unless you have a way to force all
people to vote, you will get a self-selected set.  We already know
enough about voting, the human activity, to know that this self
selected set has demographics very different from what you would get
if you could perform a random sampling.

Laura
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