On May 18, 6:29 am, harrismh777 <harrismh...@charter.net> wrote: > Terry Reedy wrote: > > > No, because I think you are exaggerating. That said, I think core > > Python is pretty close to 'complete' and I would not mind further syntax > > freezes like the one for 3.2. > > I am exaggerating only to the extent that someone can imagine folks > becoming just annoyed with PEP progress to drop the whole thing... I am > exaggerating only to the extent that we define 'it' as language death... > if the user base narrows, python's future is held tentative... on the > other hand, if the user base grows and campers are happy, then python's > future is more stable... I don't think this is an exaggeration...
one thing that people are not aware of - because it normally simply does not make its way out into the public world: you're forgetting those people who "just use" python. they don't get onto public mailing lists, they don't develop free software projects. i've mentioned this story before, but it's worth repeating in this context. i worked in a military environment (NC3A) back in 2006-2007. the version of python that they were using was http://python two... point... ONE. six years after its release. why??? well, it went something like this. someone got the idea that doing a portal would be good. so they looked around, and found Zope. so, they evaluated the latest version somewhere around ooo april to june of 2001. ok they _started_ evaluating it. so, some four months later, after doing some coding examples, we're now up to august 2001, a decision has to be made by the internal client. they say "yep, go for it", but that took another four months (dec 2002). now we do 18 months of software development (july 2003) to produce a base package. now the code now has to be handed over to a team who perform security evaluations. this has to be paid for. another six months go by, and the security accreditation is received (dec 2004). but this was just for the "base" code: now we have deployment and actual product / portal development, and a maintenance cycle of 2 years (2006). now i'm called in to help with that maintenance and development cycle (2007). and throughout this time there is *no way* that they can upgrade from python 2.1, because it would cost another $EUR 10,000 to get the accreditation certificate. it's now 2011. for all i know, some TEN YEARS after python 2.1 was released, they're still using it. you ... _just_ don't normally hear about these kinds of deployments of free software, but it illustrates that a particular version can hang around for a hell of a long time. l. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list