Guido rethinking removal of cmp from sort method

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Fri, 01 Apr 2011 13:42:11 -0600, John Bokma wrote:

> Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> writes:
> 
>> But the Perl 6 fiasco
> 
> Perl 6 a complete failure? 

"Fiasco" does not mean "complete failure". It is a debacle, an 
embarrassing, serious failure, (and also an Italian wine bottle with a 
rounded bottom), but not necessarily complete. It does not imply that a 
fiasco cannot, with great effort and/or time, be eventually recovered 
from. Netscape Navigator 6 was a fiasco, which directly lead to the 
dominance of Internet Explorer in the browser market, but today the heir 
of Netscape, Mozilla's Firefox browser, has regained a majority of the 
browser market in Europe and is catching up on IE world-wide. Those who 
are old enough will remember that Microsoft Word 3.0 was a fiasco, but 
there's no doubt that Word has well recovered to virtually own the entire 
word processing market.


> Wow, must be coming from a clueless Python zealot.

Thanks for sharing.


> If Perl 6 is a fiasco, so is Python 3. Both are not considered
> production ready, and both can be downloaded and used today:

This is FUD about Python 3. Python 3 is absolutely production ready. The 
only reason to avoid Python 3 is if your software relies on a specific 
third-party library that does not yet support Python 3.

On the other hand, the PerlFAQ still describes Perl 6 as not ready:

http://faq.perl.org/perlfaq1.html#What_are_Perl_4_Perl
http://faq.perl.org/perlfaq1.html#What_is_Perl_6_

"Perl 6 is the next major version of Perl, although it's not intended to 
replace Perl 5. It's still in development in both its syntax and design. 
The work started in 2002 and is still ongoing. ..."

"Perl 6 is not scheduled for release yet ..."

Nine years after Perl 6 was started, neither the syntax nor design are 
settled.

The initial PEP for Python 3000 development was in 2006; the first final 
release of Python 3 was in 2008, but I don't count that because Python 
3.0 was fatally flawed and is no longer supported. The first production 
ready release of Python 3.1 was 2009: three years from talking to a 
production-ready version.


> Did Perl 6 take a long time? Sure. But confusing it with Python 2 ->
> Python 3 is just plainly stupid. It's a complete rewrite of Perl, and
> it's much easier to think of it as a complete new language instead of
> similar to Perl 4 -> 5 and comparable to Python 2 -> 3.

What you have described is not a reason for rejecting the claim that Perl 
6 was a fiasco, but the reason for *why* it was a fiasco.



-- 
Steven