I don't think for a second this was worth losing Guido for, projects like this are super hard to guide and this guy did it for decades.,(reply>), @David Flanagan , young one, you need to grow up. Your ranting is wayyyy out of line in this context. Just decide to let some things go and treat people with more respect.,(reply>), @Link113  Thank you for your explanation. That makes sense. I was baffled because I have 100% control over the syntax and semantics of the language I am developing and have committed not to share it with anyone until after it matures as a result of being used to write a large scale piece of software. I don't want to be in Bjarne Stroustrup's position where he wanted to change something about <i>C with Classes</i> and his users at AT&amp;T were opposing how it would break the small amount of legacy code they had written, or how Brendan Eich did a pretty good job to develop <i>JavaScript</i> in ten days," and one of his early users persuaded him to make it so the == equality operator worked was changed to support implicit conversions of strings to numbers where the string could be construed as a number - see Lex Fridman interview:<br><br><a href=""https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0ZWtsYyX8E&amp;t=5m30s"">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0ZWtsYyX8E&amp;t=5m30s</a><br><br>So", it seems there is a social / political dimension to programming language design and evolution. Hopefully, I won't run into some unforeseen "showstopper" issue with my language the way Guy L Steele Junior ran into a technical roadblock where the rich type system they had created for <i>Fortress</i> couldn't run on the Java Virtual Machine (or any VM then available). Personally, I would either write a new VM without such limitation, if that was possible, rather than give up, or alternatively simplify the type system if it seemed impossible to map it to hardware, as it is useless if it can't be used. Maybe I have missed something subtle about the circumstances here, but after a $3,000,"000 investment and ten years of work to give up on <i>Fortress</i> strikes me as embarrassing:<br><br><a href=""https://web.archive.org/web/20160924201206/https://blogs.oracle.com/projectfortress/entry/fortress_wrapping_up"">https://web.archive.org/web/20160924201206/https://blogs.oracle.com/projectfortress/entry/fortress_wrapping_up</a><br><br>As I was only making my own language to boost my productivity in making an ambitious video game", I would be able to avoid the ten years, or so, of maturation that most languages go through in public and not have to do the equivalent of Bjarne deprecating bad idioms and evangelise a <i>Modern C++</i> only with contradictory sets of style guidelines, or have a huge monolith like <i>Visual BASIC</i> because it just kept growing without concern to balance sophistication with elegance through reimplementation of the now better understood core concepts of the language anew in a more crystalline form. If I had had users up until now I would have that social / political friction to deal with, and hopefully my new paradigm will map to hardware, but if it suffers a similar fate to <i>Fortress</i> then at least I won't have wasted other people's money and time, only my own.,(reply>), @Uncompetative because changing the function of a basic operator in any language is a bad idea unless you're redesigning the language drastically. We may see = return values in python 4, as going up a whole version in python generally indicates drastic changes (think of the changes from python 2 to 3), but it would be incredibly bad to change how = functions from one release of python 3 to another release of python 3.,(reply>), Can someone explain to me why they violated the Zen design rule and cluttered the syntax with this := operator when they could have altered the semantics of = so it would return the value of the LHS?,(reply>), @QSecty Not really python has been super stable for such of long time. A language does not need to be developed forever to be successful. That's just a myth.