But Node.JS is bad ass rock star tech

How about just not changing it at all? There's no need to look like Gawker.

To be fair, quite a few conferences are nothing more than somebody's trying to take your money. I get emails all the time with subjects like "Call for Papers for the Third International Symposium on ." If you submit a paper (or read the fine print), they'll inform you that at least one author must pay to attend the conference or they won't include it in the proceedings. There is, of course, no peer review; every submitted article is accepted, just so long as you pay them.

While we're fixing things: "the LCD's on the market can't match its picture."

Don't forget MySQL's translation of NULLs in NOT NULL constrained fields to 0 or empty strings instead of rejecting the update as a proper RDBMS should. Somebody needs to explain to them that missing data is missing, not 0. I can't tell you how many problems I've seen this cause (ofc, whether and how NULLs should be used is another discussion entirely...).

Let's not forget how it "enforces" constraints. For example, consider:

CREATE TABLE emps (id INT(10) AUTO_INCREMENT,
fname VARCHAR(50) NOT NULL,
sname VARCHAR(50) NOT NULL);
INSERT INTO emps (fname) VALUES ('John');

In a proper RDBMS, that would fail for violating a constraint. MySQL/MariaDB just massage the missing sname into an empty string, which is about as valid as just sticking 'sldfjpsdj;ksdj;fsdljkfsd.'

Just to be a pedant, nobody owns RIM shares anymore. They might, however, own BBRY shares.

That would be a backdoor in the compiler, not in Python (or CPython more properly, since Python proper is a spec, not an implementation, which is why the question is really, really meaningless).

That's one of Guido's concerns in the blog post I linked.

What does that even mean? It's a programming language, not an application or operating system. Do you mean crippling certain functions in the standard library? It's all open source.

FWIW, IronPython and Jython are GIL-free, but IronP is no longer maintained.

Exactly. It's terribly unpythonic. Sadly though, I don't have a better way to do multi-line lambdas.

You've stated (http://neopythonic.blogspot.com/2009/04/tail-recursion-elimination.html) that you consider tail recursion to be "unpythonic." Could you elaborate on that a little more. What about algorithms that are by their very nature recusive? I've found that a combination of memoization and tail recursion can, under the right circumstance, provide wonderfully clear code without taking too much of a performance hit, and Python's decorator facility always seemed more or less ideal to me for that sort of application.

If you could go back to the very start and change one thing about Python, what would it be and why?