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On Jun 23, 2010, at 8:17 AM, Steve Holden wrote:

Guido van Rossum wrote:
On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 9:37 AM, Tres Seaver <tseaver@palladion.com> wrote:
Any "turdiness" (which I am \*not\* arguing for) is a natural consequence
of the kinds of backward incompatibilities which were \*not\* ruled out
for Python 3, along with the (early, now waning) "build it and they will
come" optimism about adoption rates.

FWIW, my optimisim is \*not\* waning. I think it's good that we're
having this discussion and I expect something useful will come out of
it; I also expect in general that the (admittedly serious) problem of
having to port all dependencies will be solved in the next few years.
Not by magic, but because many people are taking small steps in the
right direction, and there will be light eventually. In the mean time
I don't blame anyone for sticking with 2.x or being too busy to help
port stuff to 3.x. Python 3 has been a long time in the making -- it
will be a bit longer still, which was expected.

+1

The important thing is to avoid bigotry and FUD, and deal with things
the way they are. The #python IRC team have just helped us make a major
step forward. This won't be a campaign with a victorious charge over
some imaginary finish line.

For sure.

I don't speak for Tres, but I don't think he wasn't talking about optimism about \*adoption\*, overall, but optimism about adoption \*rates\*.  And I don't think he was talking about it coming from Guido :).

There has definitely been some "irrational exuberance" from some quarters.  The form it usually takes is someone making a blog post which assumes, because the author could port their smallish library or application without too much hassle, that Python 2.x is already dead and everyone should be off of it in a couple of weeks.

I've never heard this position from the core team or any official communication or documentation.  Far from it: the realistic attitude that the Python 3 migration is something that will take a while has significantly reduced my own concerns.

Even the aforementioned blog posts have been encouraging in some ways, because a lot of people are reporting surprisingly easy transitions.