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Tim> "Plays well with others" was a strong motivator for Python's
Tim> design, and that often means playing by others' rules. --

My vote for QOTW... Is it too late to slip it into the Zen of Python?

Skip

In article <mailman.731.1105747996.22381.python->,
Tim Peters <> wrote:
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>reading up the bits in the index and offsets too, etc. IIRC, Unix was
>actually quite novel at the time in insisting that all files were just
>raw byte streams to the OS.
Not just "novel", but "puzzling" and even "controversial".
It was far from clear that the Unix way could be successful.
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>but generally where it's reasonably easy to hide. It's not easy to
>hide native file conventions, partly because Python wouldn't play well
>with *other* platform software if it did.
>
>Remember that Guido worked on ABC before Python, and Python is in
>(small) part a reaction against the extremes of ABC. ABC was 100%
>platform-independent. You could read and write files from ABC.
>However, the only files you could read from ABC were files that were
>written by ABC -- and files written by ABC were essentially unusable
>by other software. Socket semantics were also 100% portable in ABC:
>it didn't have sockets, nor any way to extend the language to add
>them. Etc -- ABC was a self-contained universe. "Plays well with
>others" was a strong motivator for Python's design, and that often
>means playing by others' rules.

At a slightly different level, that--not playing well enough
with others--is what held Smalltalk back. Again, a lot of
this stuff wasn't obvious at the time, even as late as 1990.
I think we understand better now that languages are secondary,
in that good developers can be productive with all sorts of
syntaxes and semantics; as a practical matter, daily struggles
have to do with the libraries or how the languages access what
is outside themselves.

Skip Montanaro wrote:
> Tim> "Plays well with others" was a strong motivator for Python's
> Tim> design, and that often means playing by others' rules. --
>
> My vote for QOTW... Is it too late to slip it into the Zen of Python?

It would certainly fit, and the existing koans don't really cover the concept.

Its addition also seems fitting in light of the current PEP 246 discussion which
is *all* about playing well with others

Cheers,
Nick.

--
Nick Coghlan | | Brisbane, Australia
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http://boredomandlaziness.skystorm.net