I often read concerns that complexity keeps being added to the language with yet another flavour of string or whatnot. Given that those who author and deliberate on PEPs are, kind of by definition, experts who spend a lot of time with the language, they might struggle to grok the Python experience from the perspective of a novice or beginner. How does the PEP process guard against this bias?

There are many long-term users of Python who participate in PEP discussion who argue for beginners[0], often because they professionally are teaching Python.

There are also loads of people basically defaulting to "no" on new features, because they understand that there is a cost of supporting things. I will often disagree about the evaluation of that cost, but it's hard to say there is no cost.

Nobody wants a system that is unusable, slow, hard to implement for, or hard to understand. People sometimes just have different weights on each of these properties. And some people are in a very awkward position of overestimating costs due to overestimating implementation effort. So you end up in discussions like "this is hard to understand!" "No it isn't!"

Hard to move beyond, but the existence of these kinds of conversations serve, in a way, as proof that people aren't jumping on every new feature. Python is still a language that is conservative in what it adds.

This should actually inspire more confidence in people that features added to Python are _useful_, because there are many people who are defaulting to not adding new features. Recent additions to Python speeding up is more an indicator of the process improving and identifying the good stuff rather than a lowering of the bar.

[0]: I often think that these discussions often get fairly intense. Understandability is definitely a core Python value, but I Think sometimes discussions confuse "understandability" with "amount of things in the system". You don't have to fully understand pervasive hashing to understand Python's pervasive value equality semantics! A complex system is needed to support a simple one!

All discussion on PEP's happens in public forums where anyone can opine on things before they are accepted. I agree that the experts are more likely to participate in this exchange. And while this is wish-washy, I feel like the process is really intended to benefit the experts more than the novices anyways.

There have been processes put into place in recent years to try to curb the difficulty of things. One of those is that all new PEPs have to include a "how can you teach this to beginers" section, as seen here on this pep: https://peps.python.org/pep-0750/#how-to-teach-this

You might find the Python discussion forums ([0] and [1]) interesting; conversation that guides the evolution of PEPs happens there.

As Nick mentioned, PEP 750 had a long and winding road to its final acceptance; as the process wore on, and the complexities of the earliest cuts of the PEPs were reconsidered, the two converged.

[0] The very first announcement: https://discuss.python.org/t/pep-750-tag-strings-for-writing...

[1] Much later in the PEP process: https://discuss.python.org/t/pep750-template-strings-new-upd...

Building off this question, it's not clear to me why Python should have both t-strings and f-strings. The difference between the two seems like a stumbling block to new programmers, and my "ideal python" would have only one of these mechanisms.