@m0xEE @kirby @lispi314 @mia @sysrq

> They have already added like five ways to format a string to it.

Maybe it was an interview question at Google and Guido just merged it whenever someone had a good answer.

> let's add static typechecking to Python!

Oh, they're doing this with Ruby, too. I can understand the reasoning that it makes some optimizations possible that would not be otherwise, there are new and exciting runtime errors you can experience, and there are compile-time errors, but if I wanted that, I know where to find the languages with static typing. The reason these languages are nice, the advantage they have is that you can kind of smear things around, you don't have to know where you're going, so they're great for prototyping, small scripts, exploring a weird dataset interactively.

:bwk: Kernighan gave this talk, something like "How to accidentally succeed at language design", it was really great. He talked some about awk, and noted that the domain was constrained. Then you see things like Ruby or Python or Java trying to be every language and making a mess of it; the worst offender is probably C++. I forget if it was him or dmr, but one of them said that a language that doesn't have everything is more useful than one that does.