Feed: Slashdot
Feed Link: https://slashdot.org/
---

Title: Python Creator Guido van Rossum Asks: Is 'Worse is Better' Still True
for Programming Languages?

Link: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/06/1...

In 1989 a computer scientist argued that more functionality in software
actually lowers usability and practicality - leading to the counterintuitive
proposition that "worse is better". But is that still true? Python's original
creator Guido van Rossum addressed the question last month in a lightning
talk 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".

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

---
VRSS v2.1.180528