[Python-ideas] from __past__ import division, str, etc

[Alejandro López Correa]

2014/1/8 Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info>:
> About 70% of the top 200 projects on PyPI support Python 3, and
> downloads of Python 3 are very healthy, possibly even higher than
> downloads of Python 2.

I do not think that one is a particularly good metric. For each
project hosted at PyPI how many are not there? People have personal
projects, companies have internal software, and there are products
that contain at least some python and are targeted at final customers,
like games or Maya. Not everything is open source, but even if it is
proprietary software it is good to have it since that way more jobs
are offered and more people can earn money with this language, and
that is a guarantee for its long-term success.

>> and minimise the risk of defection to other languages.
>
> People threaten that, but it is an irrational threat. (Mind you, people
> do silly, irrational things every day.) If you think its hard to migrate
> from Python 2 to 3, when you get to keep 90% of your code base and most
> of the backward-incompatible changes are a few libraries that have been
> renamed and a handful of syntax changes, how hard will it be to throw
> away 100% of your code and start again with a completely different
> language?

I think human psychology works like that. Many people may delay the
acquisition of a new car, but once they are committed to buy a new one
they want the best they can afford (within their budget). Some
languages may gain momentum and gain the "cool" vibe. We saw the rise
of Ruby a while ago, and maybe a language that handles well multiple
cores could be a strong temptation in the future. If people keep
investing in python, small bits at a time, keeping their codebase
always up to date, it is more difficult, IMHO, to commit to a full
rewrite.

Alejandro