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

[Nick Coghlan]

On 9 Jan 2014 22:03, "Giampaolo Rodola'" <g.rodola at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>
> On Thu, Jan 9, 2014 at 12:16 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 9 Jan 2014 09:49, "Amber Yust" <amber.yust at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > Also note that even if publicly visible projects are outnumbered by
private projects, the public projects tend to have a much larger impact on
the overall ecosystem, because they're used by many entities (whereas
private projects are typically only used by a single entity given their
nature).
>>
>> It also mistakenly assumes our goal is to get existing *applications* to
migrate. It really isn't - we're obviously delighted if app developers
choose to switch (as it indicates we have created a compelling platform),
but we *needed* key library and framework developers to add Python 3
support in order to bootstrap the Python 3 development ecosystem.
>
>
> True.
> I think one of the key points here is that different important libs
haven't been ported yet:
> https://python3wos.appspot.com/
> Too many of them are still marked red and IMO that is the main reason why
a lot of people are being so hesitant, not unicode.
> "boto" alone counts as hundreds of thousands potential users which simply
cannot migrate.
> Django made the transition only a couple of months ago, which basically
means it's still in a beta state, and AFAIK fundamental projects such as
Twisted don't even have an ETA.
> Considering 5 years have passed since Python 3.0 first made it's
appearance I consider this a *serious* delay.
> From a user standpoint this sort of appears as a signal which translates
into "if neither big project X has migrated after 5 years why should I?".
> That's likely to apply even if project X is not within the list of your
dependencies, because you may not depend from X now but maybe you will in
the future, either because you need X or because Y requires X in order to
work. It is *crucial* for people maintaining those libraries to put Python
3 porting on top of their TODO list at the cost of not working on new
features.

This is still focusing on migrating *existing* applications. We're not
especially worried if existing applications keep using 2.7 - it's a good
language that is almost certain to be commercially supported for at least
another decade, even though upstream support will switch to security fix
only mode in 2015. If it ain't broke (and for existing applications, 2.7
generally ain't broke), don't fix it. But if a project has persistent
problems with application developers persistently introducing bugs by using
8-bit strings where they should be using Unicode, or otherwise running into
the assorted bug magnets we removed in Python 3, the migration may be worth
considering.

A user that starts with Python 3 simply wouldn't consider a dependency like
boto as an option, and would reach for asyncio rather than Twisted for
their explicit asynchronous programming needs.

Cheers,
Nick.

>
> --- Giampaolo
> https://code.google.com/p/psutil/
> https://code.google.com/p/pyftpdlib/
> https://code.google.com/p/pysendfile/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/attachments/20140110/588e832e/attachment.html>