[python-advocacy] How programming language webpages should be designed

[Paul Boddie]

On Sunday 08 November 2009 23:45:09 Michael Tobis wrote:
> The level of the target audience would be such that they would not
> think to print a tuple right away, and if they chanced to they would
> not be all that concerned by the parentheses, which does not
> constitute "breakage" at that level.

Michael Foord's point (and mine) is that anyone trying to print a number of 
things using the Python print statement will use commas to separate those 
things. Putting brackets around the stuff after "print" might produce the 
same effect in a Python 3 environment, but it causes a tuple to be printed in 
Python 2. Exactly this problem is what I was referring to with respect to 
the "simple programs" page:

http://wiki.python.org/moin/SimplePrograms

You can put brackets around stuff and then start using the formatting 
operator, but that obscures the simple things, and Python 3 is moving away 
from the formatting syntax that earlier versions of Python employ.

> The transition from 2.* to 3.* is already chasing people away. (I had
> a student assistant last summer who was quite concerned about it and
> resistant to Python on that account.)  You don't want to make a fuss
> about this on the homepage if you can honestly avoid it.

This was another reservation of mine about Python 3. Virtually all of the 
existing material about Python describes stuff which isn't the core 
developers' idea of what Python should be (or eventually become); insisting 
that Python 3 is now the "true Python" doesn't magic away all this existing 
stuff.

So, presenting "Python code" to people now involves a nasty dilemma: either 
present the new stuff and get people confused about the differences between 
what they have in front of them and what people are now telling them, or 
present the old stuff and be prepared to say that it's not what the core 
developers would have you use.

Paul