Booleans, integer division, backwards compatibility; where is Python going?

[Paul Boddie]

Philip Swartzleonard <starx at pacbell.net> wrote in message news:<Xns91EB245A0BCD9RASXnewsDFE1 at 130.133.1.4>...
> 
> Huh? Your argument is all well and good, but what does supporing 
> releases earlier than 2.2 have to do with it's new features being badly 
> defined and immature themselves?

I don't know, since I myself never claimed that they were. (I could,
however, dig up some of the postings that expressed those, or similar,
sentiments.) However, I do feel that the more recent features seem
increasingly remote to the beginner and even the more
advanced/experienced Python developer. List comprehensions (introduced
in 2.0) do appear in the standard tutorial, but I can't easily find
generators, even though they are documented in the language reference.

Without slavishly following the development list archives (and having
other things to do during working hours) it becomes increasingly hard
to keep track of what's great in the more recent Python releases.
Consequently, people are going to feel less informed, and will
therefore be more reluctant to accept changes to the language on top
of those which they already know very little about.

Perhaps there should be a community site which focuses on such news
from the busy package maintainer's perspective, rather than the
language architect's perspective. (Not to undermine the presumably
excellent work already done in summarising the goings-on on the
development list.)

Paul