python 3's adoption

[Terry Reedy]

On 1/28/2010 11:03 AM, Mitchell L Model wrote:
> I have been working with Python 3 for over a year. I used it in writing
> my book "Bioinformatics Programming Using Python"
> (http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596154509). I didn't see any point in
> teaching an incompatible earlier version of a language in transition. In
> preparing the book and its examples I explored a large number of Python
> modules in some depth and encountered most of the differences between
> the language and libraries of Python 2 and Python 3. The change was a
> bit awkward for a while, and there were some surprises, but in the end I
> have found nothing in Python 3 for which I would prefer Python 2's version.
>
> Removal of old-style classes is a big win. Having print as a function
> provides a tremendous amount of flexibility. I use the sep and end
> keywords all the time. There is no reason for print to be a statement,
> and it was an awkward inconsistency in a language that leans towards
> functional styles. Likewise the elimination of cmp, while shocking,
> leads to much simpler comparison arguments to sort, since all the
> function does is return a key; then, sort uses __lt__ (I think) so it
> automatically uses each class's definition of that. The weird objects
> returned from things like sorted, dict.keys/values/items, and so on are
> values that in practice are used primarily in iterations; you can always
> turn the result into a list, though I have to admit that while
> developing and debugging I trip trying to pick out a specific element
> from one of these using indexing (typically [0]); I've learned to think
> of them as generators, even though they aren't. The rearrangements and
> name changes in the libraries are quite helpful. I could go on, but
> basically the language and library changes are on the whole large
> improvements with little, if any, downside.

I agree completely.

> Conversion of old code is greatly facilitied by the 2to3 tool that comes
> with Python 3. The big issue in moving from 2 to 3 is the external
> libraries and development tools you use. Different IDEs have released
> versions that support Python 3 at different times. (I believe Wing was
> the first.) If you use numpy, for example, or one of the many libraries
> that require it, you are stuck. Possibly some important facilities will
> never be ported to Python 3, but probably most active projects will
> eventually produce a Python 3 version -- for example, according to its
> web page, a Python 3 version of PIL is on the way. I was able to cover
> all the topics in my book using only Python library modules, something I
> felt would be best for readers -- I used libraries such as elementree,
> sqlite3, and tkinter. The only disappointment was that I couldn't
> include a chapter on BioPython, since there is no Python 3 version.
>
> By now, many large facilities support both Python 2 and Python 3. I am
> currently building a complex GUI/Visualization application based on the
> Python 3 version of PyQt4 and Wing IDE and am delighted with all of it.
> It may well be that some very important large

Something got clipped ;-)

Anyway, thank you for the report.

Terry Jan Reedy