On Wednesday, January 14, 2015 at 9:31:32 AM UTC-6, Edward K. Ream wrote: > > On Wed, Jan 14, 2015 at 8:05 AM, Ville M. Vainio <vivai...@gmail.com> > wrote: > >> FWIW, I'm pretty pessimistic about Python 3 at this point. Python 2 seems >> to be "good enough" for most people. >> > > I am not real optimistic about Python 3 myself. > > As Kent says, more and more packages are being ported. But Guido has > recently promised to support Python 2K until at least 2020 (a change from > 2015). This indicates that all is not going well. > > My guess is that there are some big Python 2K shops that still have no > real notion about how they are going to transition to 3K. It doesn't > matter how many people *have* made the transition as long as there are > important players who haven't or can't. >
This is a complex topic. Here are some further thoughts: Guido himself clearly believed (and probably still believes) that Python 2 is *not* good enough. Otoh, Guido's remarks in recent PyCon keynote speeches indicate that he will never again attempt such a radical break with existing code. He seems somewhat unhappy with the transition to Python 3. That may be an understatement. Or not. He has reasons to put a brave face on things. Kent's remark that more and more packages are being ported to Python 3 is more important than I originally acknowledged. The available packages, not the problems of big shops, are what most people care about, or should care about. In some ways, the big shops don't matter all that much. They can "take care of themselves" and they can always stick with Python 2.7. When (not if) Python 2.7 is no longer supported, big shops can start paying the price that the core Python developers are now paying in supporting the Python 2 code base. Finally, there are a growing list of reasons why Python 3 is simply better than Python 2. I actually would *not* say that Python 3's support for unicode is one of those reasons, but that's debatable. What is not debatable is that Python 3 has cool new features and modules that Python 2.8 will *never* have: - My favorite is pip install, the killer feature of Python 3.4. Yesterday I did "pip install ipython[all]" and everything Just Worked(tm). This is the first time I have *ever* managed to install tornado on Windows, and thus the first time that "ipython notebook" has ever worked on windows. - The important asyncio module https://docs.python.org/3/library/asyncio.html is Python 3 only. Yes, there is a backport to Python 2: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/trollius - Function annotations, https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3107/, will never be part of Python 2 unless they are supported in Python 2.8. - Similarly, the "yield from" syntax, pep 380, https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0380/, will never be part of Python 2. You can quibble about how important these features are (except, pip :-), but there is no doubt that Python 2 is a dead end. Edward -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "leo-editor" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to leo-editor+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to leo-editor@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/leo-editor. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
