In my eyes, "good software" does not necessarily just mean something that accomplishes its goals. You can set a goal of being bad, and that's kind of what CPython is doing.

Of course, "good" and "bad" are relative. If you don't care about performance then there's nothing wrong with CPython.

I agree with that estimate, I think it was really the idea of Python to be less than "good" by design.

I mean one doesn't need more than:

    >>> exit
    Use exit() or Ctrl-D (i.e. EOF) to exit

to see. They have that special handling, but they still don't want to let you out, because... IMO, they just want to be annoying.

When a solution could be something like:

    Note: exit() is needed in scripts. In this prompt Ctrl-D (i.e. EOF) can also be used.
    Exiting.

There has been discussion of this change a few times, e.g. https://bugs.python.org/issue44603

I generally agree with your overall sentiment, but I think it's important to note that the behavior is _not_ special handling; it's just the normal `repr` behavior at the REPL, where `exit` is an object like any other, and `repr(exit)` is that message.

Whoever types exit in REPL will never care what "repr(exit)" does.

Python has a lot excuses about the need to remain "consistent" but the reality isn't so:

    >>> x = open( "/tmp/whatever123", "w" )
    >>> close( x )
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
    NameError: name 'close' is not defined. Did you mean: 'cosh'?
    ...    
    >>> x.close()
    >>>
    >>> x = "tttt"
    >>> x.len()
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>    
    ...
    >>> len( x )
    4

I think this is to be consistent that exit is not a statement but a function. This was done with print. 3.0 was an ergonomic fix for cpython developers and language consistency fixes (also redoing the Unicode implementation).

Yeah, that message is a pet peeve of mine. Like, you know what I'm trying to do.

It sort of doesn't! It's just doing exactly the same thing it would do with any other identifier: it's printing its `repr`. Try `repr(exit)`!

More to the point, try `[len,exit,repr]`. Consider what would happen if `exit.__repr__()` did terminate the program.