Comment on PEP-0238

[Donn Cave]

Quoth Courageous <jkraska1 at san.rr.com>:
...
| [Snip: Guido's plan]
|
| This seems to me to be reasonable. While backward compatibility
| is important in computer languages, the real problem occurs when
| changes are abrupt. And in any case, we always have older versions
| of the interpreter around.

Sure.  For me, it looks like older versions is all we're going to
have around.  Python is getting too complicated, has always been
too slow (mainly startup cost), and now it's going to start breaking
existing code in a serious way, for the sake of notions that are
very debatable.  I'm not saying "play my way, or I'm taking my
ball and going" - I think I see the handwriting on the wall one
way or the other.  The present offense is probably a blessing in
disguise, since 2.0/2.1 is probably a better place to stake it
down than a couple of versions farther down the curve.

It's ironic, just recently my department has started to think about
supporting Zope on our web servers.  Of course I have been pitching
Python as the greatest thing since sliced bread for 7 or 8 years,
but my colleague, our main web server expert, was interested for a
while but gave up on it fairly quickly, and one of the criticisms he
levelled against it was that a new release will break all your code.
Not my experience at all, but how he will laugh to hear about this one.
And now, if I'm obliged to bring in these new versions of Python after
all, it probably will be because of Zope.

	Donn Cave, donn at u.washington.edu