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

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Sun Dec 7 05:20:07 CET 2008

On Sat, Dec 6, 2008 at 5:45 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

Aahz wrote:

I believe that it would be a shame and a disservice to Python if there were a large proportion of the Python community that discouraged the use of 3.0; I also believe it would be a shame and a disservice to Python if you (and other people) tell conservatives like me that we should keep our mouths shut.

I hope I am not perceived as telling you to keep your mouth shut. I am merely hoping that you will decide for yourself after having heard me out.

I don't think being honest about the situation is going to hurt anything in the long run. There are lots of advantages to 3.0, but also plenty of good reasons to stick with 2.x as well.

At this point in time, my own recommendation would be that if someone doesn't have time to do a proper evaluation of the situation (talking production development here, not "learning for fun"), then I would probably still point them at 2.5. That recommendation will probably change to 2.6 in a couple of months (since it usually takes a few months after a release for the rest of the Python ecosystem to catch up with a new 2.x release). If they have the time though, my recommendation would be for them to do their own evaluation, looking both at things that favour 3.0 like Unicode handling and general developer convenience, as well as the things that currently favour 2.x like IO speed and availability of 3rd party libraries.

That sounds right. I just heard (via Martin) that PEP 3131 (Unicode letters in identifiers) is already a big hit in Japan.

-- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

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