Chris Lattner

It's either optionally or progressively.

So people have very strong opinions on the right word to use.

I don't know.

Yeah, var makes it mutable, so you can reassign.

So Python is a dynamic language.

The way it works is that Python and Objective-C are actually very similar worlds if you ignore syntax.

And so Objective-C is straight line derived from small talk.

a really venerable, interesting language that much of the world has forgotten about, but the people that remember it love it generally.

And the way that Smalltalk works is that every object has a dictionary in it, and the dictionary maps from the name of a function or the name of a value within an object to its implementation.

And so the way you call a method in Objective-C is you say, go look up, the way I call foo is I go look up foo, I get a pointer to the function back, and then I call it.

That's how Python works.

And so now the problem with that is that the dictionary within a Python object, all the keys are strings.

and it's a dictionary, so you can only have one entry per name.

You think it's as simple as that?

I think it's as simple as that.

And so now, why do they never fix this?

Why do they not change it to not be a dictionary?

Why do they not do other things?

Well, you don't really have to in Python because it's dynamic.

And so you can say, I get into the function.