[Python-ideas] Python 3000 TIOBE -3%

[Masklinn]

On 2012-02-09, at 19:26 , Guido van Rossum wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 10:14 AM, Masklinn <masklinn at masklinn.net> wrote:
>> On 2012-02-09, at 19:03 , Steven D'Aprano wrote:
>>> The choice of which garbage collection implementation (ref counting is
>> garbage collection) is a quality of implementation detail, not a language
>> feature.
>> 
>> That's debatable, it's an implementation detail with very different
>> semantics which tends to leak out into usage patterns of the language (as
>> it did with CPython, which basically did not get fixed in the community
>> until Pypy started ascending),
> 
> I think it was actually Jython that first sensitized the community to this
> issue.
> 
The first one was Jython yes, of course, but I did not see the "movement"
gain much prominence before Pypy started looking like a serious CPython
alternative, before that there were a few voices lost in the desert.

>> especially when the language does not provide "better" ways to handle
>> things (as Python finally did by adding context managers in 2.5).
>> 
>> So theoretically, automatic refcounting is a detail, but practically it
>> influences language usage differently than most other GC techniques (when
>> it'd the only GC strategy in the language anyway)
> 
> Are there still Python idioms/patterns/recipes around that depend on
> refcounting?

There shouldn't be, but I'm not going to rule out reliance on automatic
resource cleanup just yet, I'm sure there are still significant pieces
of code using those in the wild.