Perl has used "goto &foo" for that exact purpose for ages. It just became yet another random feature that experts know about, regular programmers ignore, and critics use to show how terrible the language is.
http://neopythonic.blogspot.com/2009/04/tail-recursion-elimi...
1 - With TCO, there would be no more "recursiveFunction recursiveFunction recursiveFunction" x 1000 stack traces. Which apparently is bad. Might force someone to use a debugger, you know.
2 - Non-standard Python implementers won't be competent enough to code it, so it's best he doesn't force them to.
3 - He doesn't believe in recursion. He doesn't like it. I mean, the look of it. It's too nerdy.
4 - He made a bad choice in basing his language in dynamic binding. He recognises it, says it's horrible style, un-pythonic, but won't make it go away because users, users, yadda yadda. All this from someone whose job description is BDFL ;)
Yeah, I'm bitter about some minor quirk no one cares about, but... you know, I might have preferred a "I can't be arsed to do it" answer. Those arguments are pretty laughable.
I would dare to claim that there's some trend to do things more side-effectlessly not only in programming, but also in general, people in IT are finally realizing* that the more isolated, light-weight and modular things are (think of increased interest in functional programming (pure functions), dominance of cloud-based/inspired solutions (spinning up small instances of VMs)) the better. Somehow this particular mindset helps at all levels.
Hah, there's actually a term for what I'm trying to describe: Shared nothing architecture[2]. Allowing side-effects on any level implies "sharing" to me.
[*]: of course you could say "this has always been the case", but somehow some years ago Java and the friends seemed like the only "enterprise level" solution to most businesses and the general fat-stack+vertical-scaling seemed somewhat reasonable.
[1]: http://neopythonic.blogspot.nl/2009/04/tail-recursion-elimin... [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_nothing_architecture
Also, shared-nothing "architecture" goes back to the 60s with the first investigations into concurrency. In fact, if I were being pedantic, I would say it predates computing itself: logic is all side-effect free.
And I am not really claiming that software development changed much in 3 years, but I think people's mindsets are changing faster than that, especially of those who are actively involved in thinking about these things.
I think this would be a chance to rehabilitate the much-maligned GOTO keyword. But "tailcall" is probably just as good.