I was interested in what the design goals/philosphy was of Python 3
from a birds eye view, forest for the trees approach.
I think I can safely point to the Zen of Python[1] as many of the
points therein directly apply to the simplifiation, clarification, and
goals of Python 3. Most notably:
:: Beautiful is better than ugly.
E.g. dict.iteritems, dict.iterkeys, dict.itervalues? Strip 'iter' and
it's fixed.
:: Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
Ever get hung up on core Python modules with title caps? Yeah, those
are fixed.
:: There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
E.g. urllib, urllib2, urllibX… yeah, that's been fixed, too. :)
:: Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!
Numerous modules have been merged, or moved into more manageable (and
logical) namespaces.
I can safely assume one goal was speed improvement as in the blog he
noted "Don’t fret too much about performance--plan to optimize later
when needed." So I assume that means that Python had developed to a
point where that was needed.
The Python GIL (Global Interpreter Lock) has been getting a lot of
negative attention over the last little while, and was recently fixed
to be far more intelligent (and efficient) in Python 3.2. There are
numerous other performance improvements, for which yo ucan examine the
change logs.
But performance wouldn't be the over-arching criteria for the change.
Just curious.
Clarification, simplification, specivity, efficiency, … just be more
"Pythonic".
Note that I'm not a core Python contributor or have ever communicated
with the BDFL: this is just the viewpoint of somoene doing her
darnd'est to encourage Python 3 support. ;) All of the new projects I
work on are Python 2.6+ and Python 3.1+ compatible. (Arguments against
dual-compatible polygot code can go to /dev/null for the purposes of
this thread.)
- Alice
[1] http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/
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