Guido van Rossum on Designing with the Python Community

Related link: http://www.artima.com/intv/pycomm.html

Python creator Guido van Rossum says, "I'm an email junky. I've received many emails from both experienced and beginning Python users. Their suggestions register in my brain, and at some point, manifest into a better design decision."

Here's another excerpt from this Artima.com article:

In the early days I was fairly quick to adopt new ideas, and then I realized the community was growing and that meant more and more contributions. I had to be more selective. My first step was always saying no. Then, if people didn't take no for an answer, I would ask for arguments. Why do you think this is useful not just for you but for a large number of Python users?

If you are writing one particular approach for a popular application area, but there are lots of different ways of doing it, I won't put your particular way in the standard library if I can help it. But if there's one obvious way, clearly one best approach, I'm much more likely to put it into the standard library.