{"id":13563,"date":"2025-06-15T09:11:47","date_gmt":"2025-06-15T07:11:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/monodes.com\/predaelli\/?p=13563"},"modified":"2025-06-15T09:11:50","modified_gmt":"2025-06-15T07:11:50","slug":"what-can-we-learn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/monodes.com\/predaelli\/2025\/06\/15\/what-can-we-learn\/","title":{"rendered":"What can we learn?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I just read “Python Creator Guido van Rossum Asks: Is ‘Worse is Better’ Still True for Programming Languages?<\/a>” and I wonder what can we Eiffellers learn from it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

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Python Creator Guido van Rossum Asks: Is ‘Worse is Better’ Still True for Programming Languages?<\/a> <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1989 a computer scientist argued that more functionality in software actually lowers usability and practicality \u2014 leading to the counterintuitive proposition that “worse is better<\/a>“. But is that still true?

Python’s original creator Guido van Rossum addressed the question last month in a lightning talk<\/a> at the annual Python Language Summit 2025. Guido started by recounting earlier periods of Python development from 35 years ago, where he used UNIX “almost exclusively” and thus “Python was greatly influenced by UNIX’s ‘worse is better’ philosophy”… “The fact that [Python] wasn’t perfect encouraged many people to start contributing. All of the code was straightforward, there were no thoughts of optimization… These early contributors also now had a stake in the language; [Python] was also their baby”…

Guido contrasted early development to how Python is developed now: “features that take years to produce from teams of software developers paid by big tech companies. The static type system requires an academic-level understanding of esoteric type system features.” And this isn’t just Python the language, “third-party projects like numpy are maintained by folks who are paid full-time to do so…. Now we have a huge community, but very few people, relatively speaking, are contributing meaningfully.”

Guido asked whether the expectation for Python contributors going forward would be that “you had to write a perfect PEP or create a perfect prototype that can be turned into production-ready code?” Guido pined for the “old days” where feature development could skip performance or feature-completion to get something into the hands of the community to “start kicking the tires”. “Do we have to abandon ‘worse is better’ as a philosophy and try to make everything as perfect as possible?” Guido thought doing so “would be a shame”, but that he “wasn’t sure how to change it”, acknowledging that core developers wouldn’t want to create features and then break users with future releases.

Guido referenced David Hewitt’s PyO3 talk about Rust and Python, and that development “was using worse is better,” where there is a core feature set that works, and plenty of work to be done and open questions. “That sounds a lot more fun than working on core CPython”, Guido paused, “…not that I’d ever personally learn Rust. Maybe I should give it a try after,” which garnered laughter from core developers.

“Maybe we should do more of that: allowing contributors in the community to have a stake and care”.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I just read “Python Creator Guido van Rossum Asks: Is ‘Worse is Better’ Still True for Programming Languages?” and I wonder what can we Eiffellers learn from it.<\/p>\n

Read more →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"federated","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[98,113],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13563","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty-eiffel","category-python"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6daft-3wL","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":8964,"url":"https:\/\/monodes.com\/predaelli\/2021\/12\/06\/rusteiffel\/","url_meta":{"origin":13563,"position":0},"title":"RustEiffel?","author":"Paolo Redaelli","date":"2021-12-06","format":false,"excerpt":"Python 4.0 will never arrive\ud83e\udd1a\ud83d\ude14. 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