David Pratt wrote:
Yes these are all fairly painful scenarios. What's worse is the scenario
for organizations evaluating zope end user software using python 2. It's
will not be a great selling feature to start with the premise that
anything you see today will require major refactoring to give provide a
measure of 'futureproof' code.
It is also possible that as so long as you are tied to python 2 you may
be fighting the impression that you are speeding toward obsolescence.
Regardless, I expect this impression to develop outside the python
community and formalized as a marketing tool against python
applications. This will come into play when it is common knowledge that
P3K is stable and virtually all python technology runs on python 2. I
can see possible wins here for ruby and java as they will be evaluated
without this inherent risk.
Agreed with this marketing risk.
Note that Ruby is going through a similar transition right now though -
as far as I understand there are a number of new interpreters (on new
platforms) and compatibility changes in the air. Not sure though.
Porting will have to come soon; otherwise the risk is loose the ability
to market zope. Zope is in the fray with other frameworks in python and
other languages. Not seeing a zope emerging in P3K (as it is evolving)
is likely going to mean a challenging sell for anyone getting involved
with the framework (whether you are a developer or consumer). Consumers
need to know their data will survive this potential (think about all
those pickles).
Porting will be a huge cost to the community and I'm not sure the gain
outweighs the damage such an effort will inevitably cause.
[snip]
P3K has the potential to disrupt zope and its marketing unless there is
a means of handling this through planning (with stakeholders whose code
is used in zope). The similarity of P3K to Y2K gives me some doubt that
the branding 'Python 3000' will be seen as the best. I likely won't be
the last to draw this similarity and the potential for P3K to put major
python projects like zope in turmoil for years.
Yes, it sucks, doesn't it? When I pointed something like this out to
Guido he got very upset with me, as he felt I was implying he hadn't
thought the thing through enough. :)
Another approach is the "Ignore until it goes away" approach. Perhaps
with developments like Jython, IronPython and PyPy, plus the existing
infrastructure, the Python 2 community will be a stronger bet than
Python 3. The language developers will decide just in time to give up
Python 3. :) I consider this unlikely - the language developers are
determined do to this, and changing Python fulfills the needs of *their*
open source community, which is to develop and improve the language.
Mainly when thinking about Python 3 I just get somewhat depressed as
there really doesn't seem to be a very good way forward in this, unless,
again, a 2to3 conversion script works better than I expect, or someone
hacks up a joint interpreter which can run both Python 2 and Python 3
code simultaneously. The core developers are not planning on such and
it'd be an non-trivial effort, though.
Regards,
Martijn
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