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Comment by msl09 | Hacker News Reader

I think that a lot of the discussion of python problems is steered by the infinitely many python book writers and course instructors that have profited significantly by the current trend of "everyone must learn to code!".

If the recent changes to python syntax were to python educators would be the most affected ones since they would have to update their material or see it obsoleted. Of course there's the moral issue that they would have been misleading students if they were to say that python is as simple as it can be.

Every developer whom I spoke have similar feelings about the changes, they are minimal and if they use it, very frequent boiler-plate code could be dropped. These are of course developers that have been working with python for years and have significant code bases to maintain, novices are likely to feel otherwise.

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Your conspiracy theory is mistaken; if anything instructors profit handsomely by language churn, as people are forced to come back after this or that update.

No, the problem is simple featuritis spurred by adoption. Python has reached a point where the language is basically feature-complete, but adoption keeps growing. That means that more and more programmers arrive to the ecosystem from other fields, and advocate for constructs they are familiar with or that map more closely to their problem domains. This influence is a good thing in some cases, and a bad one in others.

Operators in particular are a minefield. Python is traditionally inclined not to use special operators, which helps readability quite dramatically. There are very few exceptions (basically only @ for decorators, which is outside code flow anyway). This is why people hate new operators so much: we work with Python to stay away from unreadable, write-only code full of special characters. I understand the frustration of rote in some areas, and any professional is free to sharpen his own tools in the way he prefers -- just don't force the ecosystem at large to lower its code quality just so you can check out 10 minutes earlier from your 9-to-5 large-codebase CRUD job.

I think you're being pretty uncharitable with that interpretation of educator's incentives.

That said, I think valuing relative beginners and non-programmers into the fold is and will be a strong point of the python ecosystem. It has fewer of R's excentricities and some of Java's straight forwardness while remaining relatively terse and to the point.

I think this addition would absolutely cut down on very frustrating boilerplate. The question is the cost to the ecosystem which is going to come down to speculation in any direction.

My opinion: no one change like this hurts a language much at all but the fear comes from the death of a thousand cuts.

This feature does two things: adds slightly crypic syntax which is very obvious to career programmers but somewhat opaque and unmemorable to anyone else.

Worse, it makes bad patterns convenient. Deep None filled object hierarchies (though occasionally unavoidable) will always be problematic in some way. This only serves to make those idiomatic.

> Every developer whom I spoke have similar feelings about the changes, they are minimal and if they use it, very frequent boiler-plate code could be dropped. These are of course developers that have been working with python for years and have significant code bases to maintain, novices are likely to feel otherwise.

The solution is for them to fire up the time-machine, go back to when the code-base was just leaving the prototype stage, and assault their earlier selves with clue-by-fours while chanting something to the effect of "use a real language for real problems!".

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