What python can NOT do?

[John Nagle]

exarkun at twistedmatrix.com wrote:
> On 10:23 pm, aahz at pythoncraft.com wrote:
>> In article <4a998465$0$1637$742ec2ed at news.sonic.net>,
>> John Nagle  <nagle at animats.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>    Personally, I consider Python to be a good language held back by
>>> too-close ties to a naive interpreter implementation and the lack
>>> of a formal standard for the language.
...
> 
> For my part, I will agree with John.  I feel like Python's big 
> shortcomings stem from the areas he mentioned.  They're related to each 
> other as well - the lack of a standard hampers the development of a less 
> naive interpreter (either one based on CPython or another one).  It 
> doesn't completely prevent such development (obviously, as CPython 
> continues to undergo development, and there are a number of alternate 
> runtimes for Python-like languages), but there's clearly a cost 
> associated with the fact that in order to do this development, a lot of 
> time has to be spent figuring out what Python *is*.  This is the kind of 
> thing that a standard would help with.

    Right.  Python is a moving target for developers of implementations other
than CPython.  IronPython's production version is at Python 2.5, with a
beta at 2.6.  Shed Skin is at 2.x and lacks the manpower to get to 3.x.
Psyco I'm not sure about, but it's 2.x.  PyPy is at Python 2.5, but PyPy
is currently slower than CPython.

    A solid Python 3 standard would give everyone a target to shoot for that
would be good for five years or so.

					John Nagle