In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Terry Reedy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >http://www.linux.com/feature/150399
Although I have no objections to the way I was quoted, the article didn't include the points I wanted to make. Here's my original interview: On Sat, Oct 04, 2008, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > Terrific! Thanks for participating. I'll be sure to put a link in the > story to your book. That would be great! Please use http://www.pythonfood.com/ > Could you say approximately how much Python 2.3 or 2.4 code you have > in your current job? What is this code used for, broadly speaking? The company I work for is http://www.pagedna.com/ -- it has been in business for more than ten years and was started with Python 1.4. I've been working there for more than four years. Our software is a web application for taking orders and sending EPS/PDF files to printing plants. There's more than 200K lines of code, most of it Python. A lot of the code resides in template files for generating web pages. (There's a significant amount of JavaScript, much of which is generated by Python code.) Although EPS/PDF generation is the heart of our application, there are many ancillary features to meet our customer needs (such as approval workflow, inventory management, and reporting). > What are your thoughts about eventually moving that code to 3.0? Would > this be a big job? At what point, if ever, would it be necessary? It would be a huge job, made more difficult because many of our bits of Python code reside in web templates. However, by the time we do the conversion the tools for automatic conversion should be much improved. Although both my boss (Tony Lownds) and I are active in the Python community, we haven't even talked about 3.0 -- it's at least two or three years away. > In your opinion, do you think it's a wise move to forgo backward > compatibility in Python 3.0, given both the user base and current > limitations of the language? First of all, I think it overstates the case to talk about "forgoing compatibility". The base Python language is still the same; the only difference immediately apparent at the simple scripting level is that the print command has changed to a function. Python 3.0 is more about removing mistakes and warts, many of which people have been encouraged to avoid for years. In addition, it is the intention to gradually merge the 2.x and 3.x series; Python 2.6 is already a major step in that direction. All in all, I think Python 3.0 is the kind of necessary evolution that software needs. It certainly isn't as big a change as going from DOS to Windows or from Mac OS 9 to OS X. > What qualities about Python first attracted you to the language? Actually, I was forced to learn Python. I was a Perl expert at the time, and I saw no reason to learn yet another scripting language. Since then, I have become enamored of Python's readability and how a typical programmer's pseudocode is trivially translated into running Python. > Of what you read about Python 3.0, what features do you find most > intriguing? The fact that it's getting done at all! For years, Python 3.0 was referred to as Python 3000 -- the joke being that it would happen in the year 3000 (meaning, never). Work only started seriously three years ago, and I think that Python 3.0 has done an excellent job of balancing the past and the future. > That's about it, though if you have any other thoughts about Python > 3.0, I'd love to hear them as well. That pretty much covers it, I think. -- Aahz ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <*> http://www.pythoncraft.com/ import antigravity -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list