A moratorium on new features to focus on cleaning up and planning for transition away from the 2.7 compatibility features that still exist? The most obvious being the libraries that we promised not to remove until 2.7 EOL.

Top-posted from my Windows phone

From: Barry Warsaw
Sent: Monday, May 7, 2018 14:26
To: Python Dev
Subject: Re: [Python-Dev] Slow down...

On May 7, 2018, at 11:49, Craig Rodrigues <rodrigc@crodrigues.org> wrote:

>

> Would it be reasonable to request a 10 year moratorium on making changes to the core Python language,

> and for the next 10 years only focus on things that do not require core language changes,

> such as improving/bugfixing existing libraries, writing new libraries, improving tooling, improving infrastructure (PyPI),

> improving performance, etc., etc.?

IMHO, no.

I don’t believe that the way for Python to remain relevant and useful for the next 10 years is to cease all language evolution.  Who knows what the computing landscape will look like in 5 years, let alone 10?  Something as arbitrary as a 10 year moratorium is (again, IMHO) a death sentence for the language.

But I do think it makes sense to think about how Python-the-language and CPython-the-reference implementation can better balance the desire to evolve vs the need to concentrate on improving what we’ve got.  With that in mind, it does make sense to occasionally use a moratorium release to focus on tech debt, cleaning up the stdlib, improve performance, etc.

CPython’s 18 month release cycle has served us well for a long time, but I do think it’s time to discuss whether it will still be appropriate moving forward.  I’m not saying it is or isn’t, but with the release of 3.7, I think it’s a great time to explore our options.

Cheers,

-Barry