> A Python4 that actually used typing in the interpreter, had value types, had a comptime phase to allow most metaprogramming to work (like monkey patching for tests) would be great! It would be faster, cleaner, easier to reason about, and still retain the great syntax and flexibility of the language.
And what prevents someone from designing such a language?
> python code could be so much faster if it didn't have to assume everything could change at any time
Definitely, but then it wouldn't be Python. One of the core principles of Python's design is to be extremely dynamic, and that anything can change at any time.
There are many other, pretty good, strictly dynamically typed languages which work just as well if not better than Python, for many purposes.
I feel that this excuse is being trotted out too much. Most engineers never get to choose the programming language used for 90% of their professional projects.
And when Python is a mainstream language on top of which large, globally known websites, AI tools, core system utilities, etc are built, we should give up the purity angle and be practical.
Even the new performance push in Python land is a reflection of this. A long time ago some optimizations were refused in order to not complicate the default Python implementation.
> Most engineers never get to choose the programming language used for 90% of their professional projects.
If it was up to me, there are plenty of languages to choose from that meet my technical needs just fine, but the political friction of getting all of my colleagues (most of whom are not software engineers at all) to use my language of choice is entirely insurmountable. Therefore, I have a vested interested in seeing practical changes to Python. The existence or invention of other languages is irrelevant.
I’m not a Python contributor, so no need to apologize to me. But if you have strong ideas about what Python should be, perhaps you should step up and contribute that code rather than saying that others are offering excuses for why they won’t deliver what you want. I have worked on other open source projects where users were very entitled, to the point of demanding that the project team deliver them certain features. It’s not fun. It’s ironic that open source often brings out both the best and the worst in people. Suggesting changes and new features is fine, even critical to a strong roadmap. But we all need to realize that maintainers may have other goals and there’s no obligation on their part to implement anything. The beauty of open source is that you can customize or fork as much as you want to match your goals. But then you’re responsible for doing the work and if your changes are public you may have your own set of users demanding their own favorite changes.
I get the motivation. Nothing wrong with that. Like I said, input is valuable for roadmaps. Just be respectful of the people who are working for FREE on Python. Unless you’re paying them, they don’t owe you anything, and saying that your dev team is already using Python and it would be difficult to change doesn’t really change that. They still don’t owe you anything.
Code is one thing, but what about writing? There is no 100% foolproof way to identify content written by LLMs, and human writing routinely gets incorrectly flagged as such. If I write a book, and a checker says that it's written by LLM, is it automatically in the public domain?
My understanding is that only human creativity can be copyrighted. So if you sketched out the plot and got the LLM to write all the words, then only the plot is copyrightable. So someone else can copy all the words, as long as they don't copy your plot.
However, as you point out, someone has to determine which bits the LLM created and which bits you created. If you wrote the whole book, and a tool incorrectly flags your writing as LLM writing, and then someone copies chunks of your book because they believed the tool and assumed they could (and assuming you filed a DMCA claim and they denied it using the tool's output as proof) then there's going to have to be a court case.
I suspect there's going to be a few court cases about this.
But the plot can't be copyrightable, as the copyright applies only to a tangible representation of an idea (e.g. written text), and not to an idea itself.
I wouldn't say more disturbing, really. But more "enlightening".
A shit umbrella is great to have if the alternative is a shit funnel. But how are you gonna appreciate the shit umbrella if it's pitch black, blocks everything at all times?
You're not gonna appreciate it. In fact, you might think some of the things your manager does are the "bad things", when in fact, it's just the umbrella bowing under all the shitload.
If the umbrella is (somewhat) transparent, you, as the manager, gain some legitimacy through transparency. You're no longer the manager that "sits around on his ass all day doing nothing". You're actually doing something for the team and they can "see" it, even though it doesn't affect them.
> it seems particularly the German-speaking countries are borderline obsessed with a) titles
There is nothing borderline about that - the German cultural space (including very much the countries of former Habsburg Empire) is still completely obsessed with titles and formal positions despite many of them losing any practical importance in modern times.
Yep. And those that did implement the standard did so for a different set of consumers with different needs.
I'm also willing to make an appeal to authority here (or at least competitive markets). If Anthropic was able to get Google and others on board with this thing, it probably does have merit beyond what else is available.
And what prevents someone from designing such a language?