There are so many fascinating insights in this article by Lambert Meertens about design principles and decisions in Python's precursor languages, B and ABC.
Here's one of them which says so much about Python and about "language wars" some still have today.
Context: It's early 80s, talking about deciding to only allow integers as array indices, despite the fact it violated one of their design principles, with Guido van Rossum joining the ABC team at around this time:
"This design decision had been driven by fear: we had been concerned that aiming too high would make our language unimplementable on the small personal computers that were starting to appear on the market. But Dewar, in particular, convinced me that this meant we were designing for the past, not the future."
And this observation should be seen in the context of another consideration that the designers of B and ABC had, which was common with another high-level language they were exposed to at the time. Here's the quote:
"The design of SETL was predicated on the philosophy that, as computers became faster and faster, human time would be more valuable than computer time "and that the efficiency of the tool set SETL provided should not be measured in terms of speed of computation, but in their conceptual power."
Some still have the debate nowadays about whether computer time or programmer time are more precious. Although this still depends on the case, more and more applications are programmer-time limited today.
But in the past, most (all?) applications were computer-time limited. Way back in the very early days it could take several hours to get the result of a program execution–no wonder languages at the time prioritised computation speed over development speed.
But things have moved on. Python took off because it came at a time when the switch over between computer-time limited applications and programmer-time limited ones was happening as computers became faster.
Yes, we still need the languages that prioritise computer-time today – there are still applications that need them, but the shift has happened and languages such as Python which prioritise the programmers' time over the computer's time will get more and more relevant (they already are, of course)
Article in Inference
