Fri, 11 Sep 2009
How the Python stdlib changes (a public service message)
In the interests of social anthropology, I feel compelled to point Pythonistas at this fascinating discussion on the stdlib-sig on adding argparse to the Python stdlib. (Yeah, it's pretty much the only traffic that list got so far this month.)
Fascinating stuff. If there's a secret cabal out there masterminding Python development, they are clearly rather poorly organized ;)
--titus
posted at: 19:26 | path: /sep-09 | 1 comments
Comments:
Posted by Kevin Teague at Fri Sep 11 23:09:07 2009:
In a dark corner of bar in the outskirts of Paris, classical music is playing from the period of the French Revolution. The buxom waitress delivers a couple stout buxom beers. The python secret cabal sip their beers slowly, waiting until the waitress is out of earshot.
Guido: "Are you sure you weren't followed?"
Brett: "Absolutely. I wore the hunchback disguise again. It's brilliant, no one could recognize me."
Guido: (folding his fingers together) "Excellent."
Brett: "Alright, let's plunk argparse into the standard library."
Guido: "Why?"
Brett: "Those Perl folks have had a tough time of it lately, especially since we released Python 3 already. If we put argparse into the standard library, we'll have three ways of parsing command-line arguments. I'm hoping that Simon will finish of optfunc, and we can put that in there later too and bring the count up to four."
Guido: (chuckling) "They'll accuse of TIMTOWTDI! That'll be good for a laugh. Let's do it, it'll give them something to talk about on reddit. At least we won't have to read endless arguments about US health care reform for one day ..."
Brett: (firing up emacs) "Alright, let's get to work then. Time to make it look like there's a discussion taking place on stdlib-sig."
Guido: "This is my favorite part. Nobody suspects our secret cabal since we just forge a bunch of phony discussions. The appearance of a choatic open source development community is the perfect disguise for our cold, calculating changes to the Python standard library."
Brett: "Your Warsaw e-mail impersonations are spot on."
Guido: "You do a good Foord impersonation."
Brett: "I love how you do the all of the Cannon impersonations though, that's the best - you sound just like me!"
(both let out a deep belly laugh, they raise their glasses to a toast, then all is quiet except the furious sound of typing)