On Sun, Sep 26, 2021 at 01:14:18AM +0200, jack.jansen@cwi.nl wrote:
I’m getting increasingly worried about the future of Python,
That Python will become even more popular? TIOBE: second place, 0.16% below C. PYPL: first place, 12.3% above Java. RedMonk: equal second with Java. https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ https://pypl.github.io/PYPL.html https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2021/08/05/language-rankings-6-21/ We must be doing something right and maybe the problems that we see are not as big as we fear. Language popularity is not in and of itself important. It doesn't really matter whether Python is 1st or 10th in language popularity. But the CPython part (at least) of the Python language and ecosystem is clearly thriving. Do you have a reason to think that it is in danger in some way? Some factor that didn't apply equally in 2001 and 2011 as it does in 2021?
and those worries have been exacerbated by the new yearly release rhythm, and the lack of a stable C-API that is full enough to entice extension writers to use it.
Admittedly, the yearly release schedule *is* a new policy. I don't remember the rationale for it or who it is supposed to benefit, and I don't know what we are doing to objectively decide whether the change made things better or worse. As for the C-API... Python is 30 years old. Has it ever had a stable C-API before now? Hasn't it *always* been the case that C packages have targetted a single version and need to be rebuilt from source on every release? These are not rhetorical questions, I genuinely do not know. I *think* that there was an attempt to make a stable C API back in 3.2 days: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0384/ but I don't know what difference it has made to extension writers in practice. From your description, it sounds like perhaps not as big a difference as we would have liked. Maybe extension writers are not using the stable C API? Is that even possible? Please excuse my ignorance. -- Steve