[Python-Dev] RELEASED Python 3.0 final (original) (raw)

glyph at divmod.com glyph at divmod.com
Sat Dec 6 21:19:15 CET 2008

As far as the original point of this thread, I started off just defending the cautionary text already present in the announcements and on the website. Since I'm not advocating any changes to that (the brief caveat on the "download" page is fine), we'll just have to agree to disagree on the abstractly appropriate audience for 3.0. I'll respond to some other points though:

On 05:54 pm, guido at python.org wrote:

On Fri, Dec 5, 2008 at 9:28 PM, <glyph at divmod.com> wrote:

On 5 Dec, 06:10 pm, guido at python.org wrote:

On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 11:27 PM, <glyph at divmod.com> wrote:

I think it's great to have specific marketing targeted towards library developers. I know we haven't done enough -- for example I promised a C extension porting guide which didn't materialize. :-(

Well, get cracking, then! :)

If you can't find it in your heart to recommend 3.0, can you at least keep that within your circle of library-producing friends?

In another (longer) message, I already said this is what I'm doing. Assuming that we are all my "library-producing friends" here :). I am deliberately refraining from blogging about 3.0 until I have something nice to say.

But still, you can't honestly expect me to recommend 3.0 until someone has gotten at least a basic skeleton of Twisted up and running under it :). My own attempts to do so have failed miserably, to the point where I can't even produce a useful bug report without a lot more work.

Would you recommend a C compiler that couldn't build Python, or link with it?

Whenever someone asks me which version to use, I alwasys respond with a question -- what do you want to use it for?

In the longer term, I think that you should look at this as a symptom of a problem. If you learn Java, you learn the most recent version. If you need your software to work with an older version, you just pass a special option to the compiler. If you want your old software to work with a new version, it basically just does (at least, 99% of the time).

I don't think there's anything about the 3.0 language which couldn't be supported in a VM that understood both 2 and 3. "py3to2" seems at least a rough proof of concept of that idea, although it still has some issues. Library availability should be a separate concern from a clean source language.

I also don't think 3.0 is perfect, and five years on, there will be a temptation to make more "just this once" incompatible changes. Of course, you've promised these changes won't be made, and this set of design mistakes will be with us forever. It would be nice if there were a way for evolution to continue without another reboot of the world.

If they're that easily convinced that Java is better they probably were a lost cause anyway, so I won't mourn their departure too much.

I really believe that all new users are fickle, if they don't have a mandate as to what they need to be learning. Personally, I learned Python because of a memory leak in Swing.

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