See though, this is the issue. What you see as a useful or mistaken feature is likely a different set to another user, just as we’ve seen above.

I think it’s a mistake to defer to the zen of python without considering the PEPs themselves which do discuss trade offs. (I’ll note that you didn’t make that claim but GP did).

Tbh I think a consensus of expert Pythonistas would agree with me. Walrus only got through because of the "dictatorship".

Perhaps :)

That’s not a hill I’m willing to die on but I agree with the positives from your list.

And the small handful of times I’ve used walrus have been nice, but not game changing.

Language features of this type should be nice and not game changing. It's how spoken word languages evolve. If every change was game-changing, it'd only be a few mutations until a dialect became a language in its own right. In reality, you get countless dialects frequently with features that eventually die off and new languages rarely and only in the aggregate.

Seems to me the 'sweet spot' for a language is a careful balance of continuing to evolve - slowly, carefully - and to not become so large as to 'not fit into one head'. Python3.9 is not yet at the 'too big for one head'; but 3.xx could be. Perhaps old-style features need to be removed, and only available via some sort of "from __past__ import old-feature-set"

It's hard for me to separate a language from what it is used to accomplish, and from that perspective, Python has been far too large to fit in one head for a good long time. Perhaps that is why I don't find any compulsion for language purity.

> too large to fit in one head

is it? I don't think the core language is that big. The libraries are big of course.

An example of core language complexity: if asked, could you explain what all of these do?

https://twitter.com/raymondh/status/1280988785841278976

The only one I didn't know was text_signature.

I'm very curious why is this downvoted?

They could just deprecate without removing.

>Walrus only got through because of the "dictatorship".

Well, then again I wouldn't consider anybody a more expert Pythonista than Guido.

I can think of some.

Such as?

I don't want to get into that kind of argument, but if you've been in python for a while you can probably think of people.

>The walrus operator was definitely a mistake.

Was it tho? It's one of my favorite improvements, and has no actual downside.

Can you explain why you don’t like the walrus operator? I personally love it.

- Languages should only make special syntax for very common or very important needs. Neither applies here.

- It violates the longstanding Python rule that assignments don't escape the enclosing scope.

> It violates the longstanding Python rule that assignments don't escape the enclosing scope.

But doesn't that violate the longstanding Python rule that A Foolish Consistency is the Hobgoblin of Little Minds ?

The trick is tell when striving for consistensy is foolish and when it isn't. Otherwise you would always be able to fall back on this quote to justify creating unuseable code/frameworks/projects/languages.

No. Assignment leaking into enclosing scope is a bad idea.

Don’t assignments already escape scope?

if True: x = 1 print(x)

`if` blocks don't make a scope. Comprehensions do.

The "as NAME" phrasing already existed. No need to invent a third confusing colon syntax to assign variables.