On * Language Design

[bearophile]

Justin Johansson:
> “There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things”

Wonderful ^_^
Finding good names for things is both hard and important.
Python development process, and the language they have produced, show that trying to invent good names is not wasted time. Every single person has quirks. So no single person is enough to invent good names. A community of people is able to smooth out such quirks and invent names that are good for the higher percentage of people. But Python again shows that sometimes in the end the final decision of a dictator is necessary (see the "x if foo else y" syntax), both to stop endless discussions, and to keep an uniform design style in the language. Most times a dictator is not necessary, and consensus emerges from the crowd itself.

Bye,
bearophile