On 7/2/10 3:07 PM, John Nagle wrote:
That's the real issue, not parentheses on the "print" statement. Where's the business case for moving to Python 3? It's not faster. It doesn't do anything you can't do in Python 2.6. There's no "killer app" for it. End of life for Python 2.x is many years away; most server Linux distros aren't even shipping with 2.6 yet. How can a business justify spending money on conversion to Python 3?
That's decision for each business to make. My guess is that many businesses won't upgrade for some time, until the major libraries/modules support Python 3. I don't plan to move to Python 3 for at least a couple of years.
Python 3 is a nice cleanup of some legacy syntax issues. But that's just not enough. Perl 6 is a nice cleanup of Perl 5, and look how that went. Ten years on, it's not even mainstream, let alone dominant.
The Perl analogy isn't really useful here. Perl 6 is somewhere between the HURD and Duke Nukem Forever in terms of being viable. Even the Perl website says, "If you are looking for production ready code please use Perl 5." That's one reason why Perl 5 development has recently undergone a resurgence.
Python 3, by contrast, is production-ready in itself; libraries are gradually moving to support it, and Python 2 has a definite end-of-life release in 2.7, with an extended maintenance period for 2.7. The Python developers are providing a much stronger and clearer path forward for Python 3. The transition period may last five years, but the path is clear.
As a Mac developer, I'm sympathetic to your frustration. A few years ago Apple deprecated one of its major API's (Carbon), on which my own development depended, and there was a lot of uncertainty about major libraries that use Carbon being updated. This is normal in any transition period. Eventually, the major libraries I depend on were updated by their developers (i.e. ported to the Cocoa API), I was able to migrate my own applications to the updated libraries, and life went on.
I think the same thing will happen with Python. It's useful to note the libraries that are not yet ported to support Python 3, and to share best practices for moving forward. Past a certain point, however, I don't see much point in attacking the existence of Python 3 or questioning the need to move toward Python 3. It's here, it's the way forward, and that's not going to change. Might as well accept it.
--Kevin -- Kevin Walzer Code by Kevin http://www.codebykevin.com -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
