On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 9:46 AM, Massimo Di Pierro < massimo.dipierro@gmail.com> wrote:
I think if easy_install, gevent, numpy (*), and win32 extensions where included in 3.x, together with a slightly better Idle (still based on Tkinter, with multiple pages, autocompletion, collapsible, line numbers, better printing with syntax highlitghing), and if easy_install were accessible via Idle, this would be a killer version.
IIRC gevent still needs to be ported to 3.x (maybe someone with the necessary skills should apply to the PSF for funding). But the rest sounds like the domain of a superinstaller, not inclusion in the stdlib. IDLE will never be able to compete with Eclipse -- you can love one or the other bot not both. Longer term removing the GIL and using garbage collection should be a
priority. I am not sure what is involved and how difficult it is but perhaps this is what PyCon money can be used for.
I think the best way to accomplish both is to focus on PyPy. It needs porting to 3.x; Google has already given them some money towards this goal.
If this cannot be done without breaking backward compatibility again, then 3.x should be considered an experimental branch, people should be advised to stay with 2.7 (2.8?) and then skip to 4.x directly when these problems are resolved.
That's really bad advice. 4.x will not be here for another decade.
Python should not make a habit of breaking backward compatibility.
Agreed. 4.x should be fully backwards compatible -- with 3.x, not with 2.x. It would be really nice if it were to include an async web server (based on
gevent for example) and better parser for HTTP headers and a python based template language (like mako or the web2py one) not just for the web but for document generation in general.
Again, that's a bundling issue. With the infrequency of Python releases, anything still under development is much better off being distributed separately. Bundling into core Python requires a package to be essentially stable, i.e., dead. -- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)