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Comment by fmakunbound | Hacker News Reader

> After much deliberation, the Python Steering Council is happy to announce that we have chosen to accept PEP 634, and its companion PEPs 635 and 636, collectively known as the Pattern Matching PEPs

This is why I'm still enamored with Lisp. One doesn't wait around for the high priests to descent from their lofty towers of much deep pontification and debate with shiny, gold tablets inscribed with how the PEPs may be, on behalf of the plebes. One just adds new language feature themselves, eg. pattern matching[1] and software transactional memory[2].

1. https://github.com/guicho271828/trivia

2. https://github.com/cosmos72/stmx

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Not only that, but we also know that no one pattern matcher fits all: with or without segment patterns? how to designate pattern variables? should it be extendable? what would we actually be matching? should we actually use a unifier? etc. Pattern matchers are easy to write, anyway.

We also know that they don't always make things clear, so we don't use them everywhere. Programmers using languages that have a pattern matcher "built in" tend to use it all the time, and it's not always a pretty sight. I conjecture that with this addition, Python codebases will become dichotomized: either it will be used everywhere, or it will not be used at all. The latter obviously has a head start :)

Fine for solo work but what happens if your team all come to work in the morning ecstatic about what they just added to the language? Now you have n problems where n is the number of members in your team.

This is what code review is for though, right? I think any reviewer worth their salt is going to be pretty skeptical about a new language feature being the right way to solve a problem.

New syntax is often a bad idea, but sometimes it's a really good idea. It'd be good to allow experimentation in the wild, and potentially upstream these features later once they've been proved out.

This is why I suggested macros as the feature I'd like to see most in the last python developer survey. Most of the time, defining a macro is bad idea and is a code smell, but sometimes they add very useful language features.

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