Quoth Peter Simons
having a dictator is not a necessary prerequisite for the ability to make decisions. It's quite possible to decide controversial matters without a dictator -- say, by letting people vote.
The problem might be slightly miscast here, as an inability to reach a decision in the face of controversy, and overall I don't think you could make much of a case that Python's development is noticeably more decisive. If you really have 8 candidates for the semantics of separator-split, then even if everyone can bring themselves to agree on one, it's still just one, out of 8 missing functions, and it's fairly understandable that this might not be very appealing. Python also - is different in that function semantics can be conveniently overloaded (I forgot the "count" parameter, I often want that one - split at the first (n - 1) locations and leave the remainder intact) - is different as a general matter of style and niche - doesn't have our division between String and ByteString - makes it harder and more expensive to implement string.split() Anyway, before it gets to the point where the crowds are camping in the city square and demanding a vote, it might be interesting to see where the code comes down on the matter, so I looked at the hackage source I already happen to have at hand, a measly 252 Haskell source files. I found one (1) separator-split implementation. I was surprised at so few, as I've done it myself several times, so maybe I happen to have an unrepresentative sample? Donn